Animals brings together Sage Sohier’s photographs of people with their companion animals, a subject rooted in the photographer’s own life and sustained across her work since the late 1970s. Growing up with four dogs and later living with three, Sohier approached animals not as decorative accessories or symbols, but as active presences within domestic and social life.

The photographs were made principally during the 1980s, with a substantial group from the early 1990s, and include images taken mostly in New England between 1979 and 1993. Their subject is the ordinary meeting of human and animal: shared rooms, posed portraits, moments of proximity, and gestures whose emotional meanings remain open. The book’s interest lies in this reciprocity. People are observed through their attachments, while animals possess their own reserve, alertness, and unmistakable individuality.

Animals is consequently more than a collection of pet portraits. It considers how companionship alters the photographic portrait, placing two species within the same frame without reducing either to a supporting role. The black-and-white work is attentive to posture, expression, space, and the quiet irregularities of everyday encounter; its tone can be intimate without becoming sentimental. For collectors, the book offers a focused view of a sustained body of Sohier’s earlier work and a clear example of how a seemingly familiar subject can acquire psychological and social complexity through patient observation and careful editing.

Published in 2019 by Stanley/Barker, this English-language hardcover runs to 104 pages. It is identified by ISBN 9781913288037, with ISBN-10 191328803X. Its value as a photobook rests chiefly in the coherence of its subject and in Sohier’s ability to make affection, dependence, and difference visible within the same restrained visual field.