Isa Leshko’s *Allowed to Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries* is concerned with a condition rarely visible in representations of domesticated animals: advanced age. Cows, pigs, goats, chickens, and turkeys are ordinarily pictured when young, reflecting agricultural systems in which many do not live long enough to become old. Leshko instead photographs animals that have reached later life in sanctuaries, placing age—and the histories inscribed upon the body—at the center of the portrait.

These pictures arose from sustained encounters. Leshko spent hours with her subjects, allowing trust to develop before making a portrait. The resulting proximity is intimate without turning the animals into sentimental symbols. Worn bodies, direct gazes, and individual temperaments remain particular to each sitter. Signs of hardship coexist with composure, while age appears neither as simple decline nor as an abstract metaphor for human mortality, but as part of an animal’s own lived duration.

Brief biographies accompanying the portraits give names and histories to the subjects, resisting the anonymity through which farm animals are commonly represented. A foreword by Sy Montgomery and essays by Gene Baur and Anne Wilkes Tucker extend the book’s frame toward animal photography, ethics, and the role of beauty in activist art. The combination matters: the photographs ask for attentive looking, while the texts locate that attention within broader questions about how images shape moral regard.

Published by the University of Chicago Press in 2019, this 208-page volume deserves notice for the precision with which it joins portraiture to animal advocacy. For collectors interested in socially engaged photography, representations of aging, or the evolving place of nonhuman subjects in portrait traditions, its significance lies in this sustained editorial structure: image, biography, and essay work together to make lives usually excluded from the record both visible and distinct.