Mark Steinmetz, Cats, 2020

Mark Steinmetz’s first book dedicated to cats, The Ancient Tigers of My Neighborhood, came out in 2010 in the precious and very limited Six by Six series (Nazraeli Press, 2010), and was chosen by Robert Adams as ‘best book of 2010’ at the Kassel Photobook festival in Germany. Felines return to prominence in the author’s first contribution to the new One Picture Book Two series: fourteen previously unpublished images of cats wandering around Athens, Georgia, the hometown of the beloved American author. Steinmetz is able to make himself completely transparent when taking photographs, something the animals probably notice when they are portrayed as well. The ‘ancient tigers’ of his childhood, in this mixture of romanticism and sense of humor, heedless of the presence of a human being with a camera, allow themselves to be portrayed in disheveled, playful, often humanized poses. Even in his portraits of our happy friends, the dramatic use of light and shadow in the author’s photographs provokes more questions than answers, and draws in perhaps the most crucial characteristic of the photographic medium: its ability to arrest time.