A Story of Bears began with a fleamarket find. At forty-nine, Sylvie Huet came across her own childhood teddy, a companion that until then had survived only as a memory and in family photographs. That reunion set off a longer inquiry into the stuffed animals people keep, and into the memories and family secrets that cling to them.

Huet photographs bears and other soft companions whose owners have held on to them for decades; the animals in the book range from forty-four to ninety-eight years old, worn, stitched, and scarred. Most are anonymous. A few belong to well-known figures, among them Jean Paul Gaultier’s Nana, Grayson Perry’s Alan Measles, the bear that inspired Tomi Ungerer’s Otto, and Jubilee, the stuffed chimpanzee that was Jane Goodall’s childhood companion. Huet approaches each with a formality suited to its standing in its owner’s eyes. The portraits are not sentimental; they treat these objects as bearers of long attachment, and the wear they show is part of the record.

The book sets those portraits beside archival photographs, recollections, accounts of meetings, and literary extracts, so that individual objects open onto larger histories. Published by Dewi Lewis in a compact hardback, with sixty-four black-and-white and colour photographs across 172 pages, it holds image and text in steady balance rather than letting one illustrate the other.

It is Huet’s third book, following projects on body modification and on how society regards dwarves; the same attention to how people inhabit their bodies and their self-images runs through this work. For collectors, the interest lies in that continuity and in the book’s method: an ordinary object, examined without condescension, becomes a means of examining memory, ownership, and the persistence of childhood. It is a quiet, precisely made volume whose subject rewards the seriousness of its treatment.