Colleen Plumb’s photographs examine the intersections and contradictions between people and other creatures, and this first monograph gathers that inquiry into book form. Her subjects range from household pets to circus animals to roadkill, and the sequence keeps tenderness and indifference in the same frame without resolving them. The publisher describes the work as exploring how animals are used for entertainment, companionship, food, and work, and how their images populate consciousness, ritual, myth, symbol, and corporate branding. The title’s plainness matches the photographs’ tone: close observation, no sentimentality.
Plumb’s formal choices carry the argument. Color, framing, and selective focus direct attention to details that can appear humorous, delightful, or disturbing, often within the same body of work. Lisa Hostetler, associated with the Milwaukee Art Museum, contributes an essay that places the photographs within broader questions about animal representation. The book also invokes Henry Beston’s 1928 passage from The Outermost House, which describes animals as other nations caught with us in the net of life and time. From that framing, Plumb asks whether the notion of the sacred can survive alongside our evolution—a question the pictures pose rather than answer.
Radius Books published the volume in hardbound format at roughly nine by ten inches, with 128 pages. The publisher’s description of the arc—contradiction, assimilation, appropriation, distance from origin and death—indicates that the book is conceived as an extended sequence rather than a portfolio of isolated images. Within contemporary American photography on human-animal relations, the project’s distinctiveness lies in that sustained thematic pressure, holding affection and consumption together in one frame.
For collectors, the elements that matter are concrete: Plumb’s first monograph, issued by Radius Books, with an essay by a museum curator and a stated conceptual program. The book’s significance rests on the work it assembles and the way it is framed, not on claims about scarcity or reception. It belongs with photobooks that treat a single question across many pictures, allowing no easy position for the viewer.
