Charlotte Dumas has long photographed animals, and since 2015 she has returned repeatedly to Yonaguni, a small Japanese island where a critically endangered breed of native horses roams freely. In *Ao* — the title is the Japanese word for blue — she brings those horses together with the island’s landscape and with three young girls whose spirited independence, in the publisher’s words, brings a new energy to the island. Across its eighty pages the book does not document a species so much as trace a shared atmosphere: a special blue recurs in round glass objects, in ballet shoes, and in a horse’s girth cloth, linking Japanese nature, the island’s horses, and the girls within a single visual register.

Dumas is known for intimate films and photographs, and *Ao* extends that approach without forcing a narrative. The sequencing lets connections emerge gradually, so that horses and girls are never reduced to symbols of one another. Maria Barnas contributes a text, but the book’s argument is primarily visual. The design — a softcover with double cahier, 23.5 by 29 centimetres — gives the images room while keeping the object itself in hand.

The book is not a survey of Dumas’s career but a focused study growing out of sustained engagement with a specific place and its inhabitants. Published by Fw:Books, it sits alongside her other animal portraits while remaining distinct in its attention to colour and to the island’s layered past. A tragic part of that past comes through in the photographs and films.

For a collector, the appeal lies in this convergence of subject and form: a considered example of how a photobook can hold together a place, a history, and a way of looking without overstating any of them.