Kevin Horan was making portraits of people long before he left Chicago and found himself listening to his new neighbours: sheep, whose voices differed so much from one another that they struck him as individuals. Goats and Sheep, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2018, grew out of that shift. It applies the conventions of studio portraiture to animals usually seen only in herds.

The sitters are handled as if they were customers at a local photo studio. Posture, gaze, coat and horn become the material from which a character seems to assemble itself, and Horan keeps his own uncertainty inside the frame: can a photographer cross the species gap, and who exactly is looking back? He is candid that a portrait is partly a construction, completed by whoever stands in front of it.

That makes the book less a survey of farm breeds than a study of portraiture itself — what it does, and what it allows us to see. Our reading of gesture is elemental, closer to the nervous system than to language, and photography is unusually good at catching it. Horan treats sustained attention as a form of respect for creatures that have lived alongside us for a very long time, and he argues that the hard line drawn between humans and everything else narrows the world instead of protecting it.

Elena Passarello contributes the accompanying text. The volume runs 112 pages in a large hardcover format, 23 by 32.2 centimetres, and Horan’s photographs are given room to work at that scale. His background is in photojournalism — staff positions at the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times, later assignments for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic and others — and his earlier animal series, Chattel, was selected for the Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 in 2014. For a collector, the interest lies in seeing a documentary discipline redirected and slowed down: one photographer returning to the same portrait grammar, asking the same question about where a person ends and an animal begins.