In the autumn of 2014, Tomáš Werner spent two months in Miami photographing a small dog named Q. From more than a hundred exposures he assembled the seventy-two pages of A Handbook for Dog Walkers, published by GOST Books in 2015 in a foil-blocked hardback. The book is not an instruction manual, and its title is knowingly at odds with what it contains: a concentrated sequence in which the animal appears as a recurring fixed point in a shifting urban field.

Werner’s method is selective rather than documentary. The camera stays close enough that surroundings become weather, surface and light; buildings, roadsides and passing figures enter only as frames for the dog’s small, serious presence. Elliott Erwitt, whose own photographs of dogs are a familiar reference, contributes an afterword. His role here is that of a writer, and the book’s images are Werner’s alone.

What distinguishes the volume is its economy. Seventy-two pages is enough for recurrence to register as rhythm, but not so many that the photographs become inventory; the sequence keeps returning to Q without repeating itself. The foil-blocked cover gives the object a quiet, formal weight consistent with the restraint inside. Miami is present throughout, yet the city is never argued into a subject. It remains the setting that lets the dog hold the page.

For a collector, the book’s interest lies in that balance of intimacy and distance, and in Werner’s decision to build a body of work from a single, unremarkable subject over a short, clearly bounded period. The result is a small, disciplined book about looking closely at something ordinary, made with a seriousness that outlasts its subject’s charm.