Cat., from Hoxton Mini Press, is an anthology with an argument behind its deadpan title. It collects contemporary photographs of cats by a large international roster — Marcel Heijnen, Robin Schwartz, Nguan, Carli Davidson, Andrius Burba and Tony Mendoza among roughly two dozen contributors — and prints a text by Lucy Davies alongside the plates. The book runs to 192 pages and appears in hardcover at a compact 18 by 13 centimetres, a scale that suits the closeness of the subject without making it slight.

What sets the collection apart is its resistance to the familiar register. The pictures were chosen to work against the windowsill and the lap: cats are made in studios, on location, through abstraction and deliberate contrivance, by photographers with settled bodies of work and by others still building one. The result is less a survey of feline behaviour than a record of what a single subject can be made to yield when the brief is invention rather than charm.

Because no one sensibility governs the book, its coherence comes from editing and sequence. Photographers formed in different traditions are placed close together and end up measuring one another; the juxtapositions carry as much interest as any individual frame. Davies supplies a continuous thread of commentary, but the images do the heavier work.

For a collector, the case is plain and does not rest on scarcity. This is a substantial group anthology, coherently assembled, that documents a wide and current set of responses to a subject that invites cliché. Its value lies in the range of approaches held in one volume — the cat treated as a formal problem rather than an ornament — and in the fact that the credits are set out in full, so the book can also be read as a map of who is working where. That makes it a useful addition to a shelf of contemporary photography rather than a trophy piece.