The French Cat

Photographer and ailurophile Hale (101 Cataclysms), born in New Zealand and living in France, offers a gorgeous love letter to her adopted country, its cities and famous light, and most of all—its cats. Cats are adored in France, she finds. Even the “gutter cats” are cherished, fed by villagers and “allowed to remain singular, self-contained, standoffish.” Photographing felines wherever she can find them—basking on the docks, posing on a “baronial staircase”—becomes a sort of shorthand for her process of observing, parsing, and celebrating French culture and the land. For the images are, above all, lush landscapes: studies of the abundance of the countryside, the lavender fields, the way “the mist rises off the Canal du Midi,” the “milky” light in the south, the drier “dusty” light of the Languedoc. And her cityscapes, of cats slinking along cobbled streets, allow her to observe the French ethos, “how the French let things be.” Narrow roads haven’t been widened to accommodate cars; cars have been built small and compact. Her methods also make for fun reading, how she travels with cat toys to attract the attention of her skittish subjects and to lure them into the frame (not always successfully; one cat rewards her with a vicious bite). The book—and photos—can flirt with gauzy sentimentality, but at their best, these are evocative, beautifully composed landscapes and interiors that just happen to feature the small, inquisitive face of un petit chat. (Oct.)