Yana Wernicke photographs two young women who have each, independently, pulled farm animals back from the brink of death. Rosina and Julie take in creatures ordinarily valued only for their yield, and the book records what grows in the space that opens: trust, play, tenderness, a willingness to touch. The animals are not symbols here, nor are they props. They are companions in the oldest sense of the word. The German title, Weggefährten, means those who walk the path together, and Wernicke’s camera walks it—through joy, through grief, through the unglamorous daily labour of care.
The work takes shape against a specific intellectual backdrop. John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? described a modern loneliness between species, the slow collapse of an older intimacy into distance, commodity, and Other. Wernicke photographs on the far side of that diagnosis, in the small, stubborn fact of people who have decided to close the gulf rather than observe it.
What distinguishes the series is its refusal of sentimentality. The bond is not illustrated; it is inhabited, through proximity, gesture, and the quiet weight of a shared room. The photographs move between human and animal without hierarchy, which is harder to achieve than it sounds.
For a collector, the object itself matters. Loose Joints has issued the book as a section-sewn, quarter-bound silkscreened hardcover in a 17 × 24 cm format, with 52 tritone plates across 112 pages, edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon. The tritone reproduction gives the series its tonal range—the soft, almost romantic skin of light on fur and fabric. The design is restrained and deliberate, in keeping with a publisher whose list treats the book as a form rather than a container.
Companions was shortlisted for the Prix du Livre at Rencontres d’Arles in 2023, placing it within a specific conversation about what the photobook can do in the present. It is the work of an artist whose concern—our relationship to animals and to the natural world—has been consistent across earlier projects. This is a book about ethics, and about the small daily acts that give ethics a body.
