Mark Steinmetz’s Cats is the sixteenth entry in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series, a hardcover volume of sixteen pages containing fourteen photographs. The publisher describes the pictures as cats and kittens making themselves at home in Athens, Georgia, and notes that all fourteen were previously unpublished. For his first contribution to the series, Steinmetz again chose cats as his subject, an aspect of his work the publisher states was previously represented by Ancient Tigers of My Neighborhood, issued in the Six by Six series and nominated by Robert Adams as a Best Book of 2010 at the Kassel Photobook Festival in Germany.
The book’s form is compact. Fourteen duotone plates on matt art paper carry the sequence; the print quality is central to how the photographs are presented rather than incidental. Athens, Georgia is the setting, and the cats and kittens are pictured in domestic surroundings there. The publisher frames the title as an opportunity to bring Steinmetz’s photographs of cats to a wider audience, following the earlier, limited treatment of the same subject in the Six by Six series.
Steinmetz’s standing is documented by the publisher: he is a Guggenheim Fellow, and his work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Cats is limited to 500 numbered copies, each including a 5×7 inch original print signed by the artist. A limited quantity of Artist’s Proof copies was also offered. The signed print is part of the series format rather than an exception, and it gives each copy two distinct components: the bound sequence and the loose photograph.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in the intersection of a focused subject, a deliberate small format, and a numbered edition that carries a signed original print. It extends a body of cat photographs Steinmetz began with Ancient Tigers of My Neighborhood, and it belongs to a series designed around concentrated, single-subject volumes. The combination of duotone printing, matt art paper, and the signed print makes the physical object itself part of the work’s reception.
