The Photographed Cat: Picturing Close Human-Feline Ties 1900-1940

by Arnold Arluke, Lauren Rolfe

The Photographed Cat presents readers with an examination of how human-cat relationships are depicted in early twentieth-century photography.

Genres: Cats, Nonfiction, History, Photography, Sociology

134 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2013

Reviews

[Mummy Cat Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this book would be more pictures than anything. I was interested in seeing, not just cats, but pictures of times past. That is not this book. The book does include pictures of cats with people BUT it is mostly made up of ...dare I say...peer reviewed with an emphasis on theories by sociologist, Norbert Elias. "A vibrant animal rights movement has emerged that includes commitments to making zoos more comfortable for their inhabitants, eating vegetarian, protecting endangered species, and espousing numerous other animal causes."

From the authors written words: "The book focuses on the period from 1900 to 1940, yet it delineates how this period emerged from what preceded it..."

I have to say I am disappointed. The cover pictured above, really gives off a differently feel vs what is actually in the book. What I got from reading the pages is how society has changed from 1900- now. What society has deemed important and the topic is how cats have become very popular pets vs a time when they were not adored as they are now.

The authors describe their work as, "the most carefully executed, sustained, and insightful uses of visual data for social and cultural inquiry..." They go on to say, "We wrote The Photographed Cat for many audiences. Pet lovers and others interested in domestic animals, especially those having cats themselves can enjoy seeing how photographs depicted human relationships with cats a century ago."

I was disappointed in this book because I was expecting something different than it really is. This book isn't cute pictures of cats and people from an age gone by, it is completely filled with theory of social psychology and about how the authors tried to study the pictures to see what people and cats were doing 100 years ago. I guess cats haven't always been the best pet. Their popularity in the home grew around the turn of the century.

The authors point out a good fact about society. Today we have moved more toward animals rights, while back then, this didn't exist. Animals were animals and didn't come before humans. "...most people saw significant differences between the moral status of humans and that of animals and exercised substantial dominion..." This sounds harsh but that is the way it was.

Each chapter focuses on a different connection that the authors have narrowed down for the reader. They looked for clues that "display 'tie signs' or 'with markers' that are evidence of relationships between person and other 'things'..."

I don't feel like the book translated well to kindle. It would be interesting to see what the book looks like as a hard copy. There doesn't seem to be a lot of pictures. Each picture has a caption with more explanation. With the kindle version, the pictures and captions were not together.

Overall, I found the information in the book to be more of an essay for those in the field (peer review) and not a book for the average person. The language and thoughts behind the authors is detailed and not something everyone will enjoy or understand. Book really takes off with the theories of Elias. The bibliography was extensive. In addition to theory, there is discussion on class (SES) and gender roles around the turn of the century. There were some pictures that we taken in the mid 1920s but most were from 1908-1918. I wasn't able to really enjoy the pictures because the text was so deep. The author ha to detail the pictures for the reader and explain it to me. I wasn't really allowed to look and decide for myself what I interpreted from the pictures. I felt like I wasn't really being allowed to think for myself and I needed the authors to tell me what to think. I don't think the book was titled, marketed well and the completed work didn't work for me, I gave this book 2 stars.

Content: clean

I recieved a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[AnHeC the Paperback Obliterator · Rating 4 out of 5]

word count: about 50 000
rating: a solid sociological paper

I'm very impressed. I've never thought of using Goffman this way XD Some of you man not know this, but for years I've studied sociology (as in: went to university). Which means that references to people like Norbert Elias make me smile. A lot.

What are you in for? A proper academic paper. An accessible one, true, but don't expect sarcasm, profanity or wild punctuation. The structure, the language... it's all academic writing. Which is why people that expect lots of cute pictures and colloquialisms will be sorely disappointed. Here you get a proper introduction, abstract of the contents and then thorough analysis. There are pretty much no pictures until you're 30% in. Hey, that's how much a set-up takes. It's the way it's supposed to be.

Number of pictures? Just right. It's not a picture book, but there's a lot of analysis of examples. And I mean lots. I was actually pleasantly surprised.

Claims made by the author? Take into account the fact, that those are just pictures and as such are not a direct reflection of reality. I love sociology done right. Everything we do conveys lots of information. Much can be said based on an innocent picture, if only one knows how to look at it.

Structure? Bang on. You know how to properly write a paragraph? I'll tell you how. You should be able to read just the first and the last sentence and get a good idea of what it conveys. That's how you read when there are exams around the corner and you have no time to read all the materials. Read the introduction, the ending, and first+last sentences of paragraphs. If the text is written properly it will work out wonderfully for you. Did this text pass this test? Impressively, yes.

Why not 5 stars? Because it could be shorter, more compact. I do understand the difficulty, since there's too much material for an article, but too little for a full fledged book. I think the author wrote it just right. It's not artificially blown out of proportion, but he stretched it to the limit.

Also it's not a revolutionary book. It's not a ground-breaking paper. The conclusion was just what you'd expect. So why bother with research? Because: science. No amount of intuition and common sense can replace proper analysis of materials. Only this can confirm your intuition and make it official. Why do it? Because sometimes you notice unexpected things. Happened to me before (seriously, I'm still not over some things I've noticed during such research). It's definitely a worthwhile thing.

And I did learn some new, interesting, historical facts while reading this book.

In the beginning I found it difficult to get into it, but then it sucked me in. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was far better than expected.

[Marie Hew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Love the period photos. Skimmed through most of the sociological babble about the perceptions and role of house cats in photos across the first 5 decades. My cat lover heart wasn't really satisfied. I thought it was going to be much more interesting than it turned out to be.

[Online Eccentric Librarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

More reviews (and no fluff) on the blog http://surrealtalvi.wordpress.com/

The Photographed Cat is written by a Ph.D in Sociology. and is an examination of the change in role that cats achieved at the turn of the century, using photography as the research base. The author clearly states in the forward that this is not meant to be a large coffee table book full of pretty pictures without context or meaning. Rather, the images in the book, about 130 or so, fell into a group of categories that told the story of our relationship with the domesticated animal. The author chose photography since it came into its own at the same time that our modern relationship with cats was formed. The invention of the brownie camera allowed ordinary people, not professional photographers in studios, to depict cats in a variety of ways that told the story of the relationship around the turn of the century.

The book is very text heavy and can read very drily. There is no pretty design work here - this is a very functional showcase of the text. Images are small and used sparingly to illustrates points in the text - not the other way around. As such there is a lot of reading here - it can be fascinating but it can also be very clinical. Also note that the book focuses on the positive side of human-cat relations and does not cover abuse and neglect subjects (which were rarely photographed).

The book is divided as so: an introduction and forward. Chapter 1 is an overview. Chapter 2 looks at how portraits showed cats as objects or still life. Chapter 3 discusses the bond between cat and owner (the dyad portrait). Chapter 4 discusses how cats were shown as members of the family. Chapter 5 goes into the male and female relationship with cats and the differences in how they were posed with their animals. Chapter 6 is a fun chapter showing all the mascots on various WW1 ships. The last chapter is a final text about the previous chapters and pulling it all together.

In all, this is a fascinating read. As a photographer myself, I found it to be more interesting as a discussion of the human-cat relationship than anything particularly interesting for a photographer. I give it a 4 star rating - short of a 5 star due to the dry presentation and text. The love and companionship between human and cat in the photographs was sadly missing in the text itself, which tended to be clinical.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice idea, shaky execution

OK, the idea was, Lauren Rolfe would gather up a bunch of old photos of pet cats (1890 - 1940, +/-), Prof. Arnold Arluke would write scholarly commentary, and the Syracuse University press would publish their book in a nice oversize "coffee-table" format. Well, parts 1 and 3 came off, but Prof Arluke -- well, let's just say, he writes an awful lot without saying much. Plus, we get such gems as, on referring to pets as "pets":

"We respect the growing sensitivity in language to refer to "animals" as "nonhuman animals", and to "pets" as "companion animals" ...

Writing on "tender inequality" (I'll let you work that one out for yourself) in old pet photography , Prof. Arluke writes an amazingly opaque discussion about how photographing people with pets was (somehow) a lot like taking photos of white people with black slaves [!!] (I'm not making this up, pp. 8-9), and, in a footnote, writes "We realize that making this comparison is a sensitive and political issue to those who feel it diminishes the significance of the oppression of African Americans."

Well, I stopped reading the text about there, and went on to the pictures, which are pretty good, but mostly old enough to be public domain, and readily available online.

So. If you see this on the library shelf, it's worth browsing, and maybe giggling at the academese -- but not worth buying, imo.

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lauren Rolfe, one of the contributors to this volume, is ‘a collector of early-twentieth century animal photographs’, something which I find utterly adorable. The whole idea of this book is lovely, in fact. The introduction is nicely written and set out, and I love the way in which it ties in the history of mankind and such things as the Suffrage movement, all the while making it entirely applicable to the world’s growing love of felines. I like the academic feel of the book, too. Some of the photographs were incredibly sweet, and my personal favourites involved cats being dressed up. (As you can see from the image I’ve used at the start of this review, my own cat adores being dressed up). Now for the negatives. In the Kindle version of this book, the footnotes are a little odd. It would have been far better, I feel, to have them all collected in one place at the end of book with hyperlinks leading from the corresponding text, rather than being plonked in any which way. I was reading a paragraph, and it was cut off right in the middle by a footnote, which became rather irksome when it happened repeatedly. The book felt disjointed at times in consequence. The format, in this sense, was not overly good for a Kindle book, and the photographs were tiny unless you patiently went through each one and enlarged them.

[kathyrn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Photographed Cat: Picturing Human-Feline Ties, 1890-1940 shows us how our cats went from being kept outside as mousers and barn cats to living inside with us as beloved family members. It's also a history of photography in America as much as it is of cats. When I look back at my family photos I have one childhood picture of my father with his dog outside. Now I have 2 cats and have a whole photo album devoted to them.

The book is divided into sections that show cats being photographed in still life settings like in earlier paintings, cats in advertising, cats being photographed outside with their owners then being part of family photos indoors too, to cats with other domestic animals as being part of a "peaceable kingdom" in our lives and their's.

While the book has over 130 photographs it is not all photos. It is also a beautiful written history of the photos and the history of pets and domestic animals in America. I highly recommend this book for all cat lovers and people who enjoy looking at old photographs for the history and stories they tell. It is just a wonderful book. Reviewed from netgalley edition.

[Roberta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a decent collection of late 19th and early 20th century photos of people and real-photo postcards of buildings but there is so far only one photo of a cat in my collection. I was interested in adding more to my collection but I soon found out that many of the studio portraits and real-photo postcards showing cats were more expensive than the ones of people and buildings. I found that interesting, too.

What I liked about this book is that there is a lot of information about how people felt about their cats in the past when these photos were taken and why photos were posed the way they were. There was also information about some of the photographers who took the cat photos. A couple photographers used the same cats in a whole series of postcards. There are fewer illustrations in this book than there are in books written by and for postcard collectors but there is a lot more textural information. That's fine with me because the last postcard book I bought was a huge disappointment. It contained pictures of every postcard in the author's collection and absolutely no information about them whatsoever!

[Bloggeretterized · Rating 4 out of 5]

A magnificent Collection of Feline Photographs. Can I just say: WOW! It's the Encyclopedia of Cat History!

Don't expect this one to be a decoupage of kitty photos...it's a serious feline photography study.

I was gladly surprised as to how much research the author did. One might think that photographing cats is not something extraordinary or has not been something extraordinary but it was nice to learn how cat photography and how the "human/cat" bond/relationships have evolved through the years. It could almost be taken as a science!

This would make a great coffee book for cat lovers and for photography lovers.

[Killian]

I think I went in expecting more pictures than walls of text which immediately threw me off. The subject matter is nothing more than "mildly interesting" to me, so I just couldn't get involved in this title. Might be a nice coffee table book, or something a student of photography or sociology would be interested in. Just not for me.

Copy courtesy of Syracuse University Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Donna Brown]

As an avid cat lover (I have six), I thought this would be a very interesting book on multiple levels but ultimately I just found it too dry. I completely get the need to provide background to the book and the research that was undertaken but I felt the preface, introductions and explanations far overwhelmed the power of the images themselves, which was a real shame. I probably wouldn't recommend it to cat lovers, though maybe to academics, though I still think the concept was excellent.

[Katrinka · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite the textual flaws, if you collect anything "cat" you will probably enjoy looking at this book. Ms. Rolfe's collected photographs are interesting and so it's a pity that the text tries hard to be, but ultimately fails due to Mr. Arluke's reader-exhausting pedantry, with the speciousness of his arguments proving even more boring than they are frustrating. I dare you to read the whole thing without thinking "what the hell is wrong with these modern Academicians?"

[Kasey Cocoa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful collection that would be a perfect complement to anyone's coffee table. Great for all ages and sharing together as well as looking over with a cup of your favorite beverage. This is one I would love to have.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a definite read for cat lovers. The illustrations were wonderful in depicting the importance of cats historically. Aside from the captivating photographs, the description about the evolution of cats in our society further explain why these furry little animals are admired by so many.

[ReadingWench · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not what I expected, but still good.