Tim Flach's new book, Feline, is a remarkable collection of images exploring a wide range of cat species, our relationship with them and why we find them so cute. He talks to David Clark
As a nation, we love cats. There are around 11 million pet cats in the UK and there's at least one in almost a quarter of all households. Cat videos are a perennial favourite on social media channels. Yet the cats themselves are largely indifferent to us and generally do as they please. They are perhaps the most difficult domestic species to photograph. Undaunted, Tim Flach has chosen them as the subject for his latest monograph.
Tim's studio is located in an impressive but anonymous building on a main road running through London's Shoreditch. On shoot days, often involving animals and their owners, it's full of activity, but on the day I visit it's quiet and empty.
Tim, a youthful and energetic 67-year-old, greets me at the door and offers a coffee. But there's no instant stuff from a jar here. 'This is my favourite: organic coffee with lion's mane and chaga mushrooms,' he says, grinding the beans carefully. 'It's supposed to improve focus and memory.'
Tim's meticulous, detail-oriented approach extends to everything he does, especially his busy and successful photography career that began in the early 1980s. Since then, his commercial work has included campaigns for a range of leading brands and organisations, while his personal work includes seven monographs on different animal species, including dogs, horses, endangered species and birds.
When tackling the subject of cats, Tim says he thought carefully about his approach before starting. 'It's hard to think where to take the subject without falling into a degree of sentiment,' he says. 'Coming out with some dignity feels a major challenge with cats. I felt I needed to collaborate with scientists and create images that engage with the stories around the different images, to really go on a journey to unmask the essence of feline.'
His book explores cats in their historical context and their changing role in our lives, from being highly valued in Egyptian times, then later reviled in the 16th century for their association with witchcraft and finally to their status today as beloved pets.
Tim's book, Feline, includes images of Egyptian sculptures of cats and mummified cats, wild cats and big cat relatives such as lions and leopards. It also features some of the more outlandish pedigree breeds of today and cats with unique markings, sometimes caused by genetic mutations, that have made them social media celebrities.
He says, 'With the breeds, I was asking, why are we trying to shape these animals, God-like? What does that say about the ethics of breeding an animal so that it looks a certain way but will be less healthy than the original? What does that say about us?'
The book took two years to complete and included travelling to countries including Japan, Canada and Borneo to photograph particular species or unique individuals.
As in Tim's other work, the images are highly detailed and visually striking. Restlessly creative, he explores cats from every conceivable angle as well as homing in on small details such as eyes, paws, claws, ears, teeth and whiskers.
He also takes great care in the selection of images for his book, both in how people might respond to them individually and how they relate to each other. 'I find it interesting to slightly confuse the viewer by abstracting something down, or, for example, putting a clay litter tray in the middle of the book,' he says. 'It's not something you'd expect. Or to have an image that looks like naked mole-rats, but are actually newborn kittens.
'These things disrupt, and sometimes you have to disrupt a little bit to really stimulate people's engagement. You don't want to lose the viewer and you don't want to bore them stiff either. You have to have the balance between simplicity and complexity.'
One of the aspects of cats he tackles is their cuteness. 'I felt I needed to say, okay, what is cuteness about? Why are we compelled to like things with big eyes, small chins and big foreheads? It's not enough to fill the book with cute kittens, but instead to actually try to explore what that means, to bring the science and the evidence.'
The book includes a chapter on cuteness written by the prominent neuroscientist, Professor Morten Kringelbach, and the visual evidence includes MRI scans of Tim's own brain, showing it lighting up in response to images of kittens, puppies and human babies. 'Morten's work shows that all these things activate an area in the brain that's separate to adult faces and this happens faster than conscious thought,' Tim says. 'Essentially, our brains are hard-wired to care for babies. Cuteness triggers caregiving.'
Tim also had to find a way to counter the increasingly widespread use of generative AI in images today and try to prove that the animals shown in the book are real. 'There's been an erosion of trust in images,' he says. 'Some of the cats in the book are so unbelievable that one immediately thinks they've been created digitally. People know you can go into AI and say, give me a cat that's half one colour and half another, and it will pop out something convincing.
'Our problem in the past was getting the cat just to stay on the table. Now our problem is proving it ever existed. So, I decided to give evidence, in the form of behind-the-scenes footage, to ratify what we were photographing was real.' Readers of the book can access those videos by scanning the QR codes printed inside it.
'Interestingly,' he continues, 'those videos also added something new to the project, because, like the BTS footage in an Attenborough nature documentary, we can show what the cats are like in reality as well as something about the process of photographing them on set.'
The domestic cat shoots either took place in Tim's studio or in the owners' homes. 'We were in people's bedrooms, in hallways, sitting rooms and kitchens,' he remembers. 'We were setting up studios wherever we had to. So, although the images might seem quite controlled, they were actually taken in makeshift studios. We had to pack all my studio kit in the car and go to the animals.'
His assistant, April, provided invaluable help in a variety of ways, not least by dangling a feather on a long stick to catch the cats' attention. On some shoots they were further assisted by Tim's producer and 'cat wrangler', Gina Rymer, and the owners themselves.
Sometimes the cats were photographed as if Tim were shooting a human portrait. Other times they were shot from below as they walked across a sheet of glass embedded in the studio floor, or, when willing, they walked on a one-metre spinning wheel, something they seemed to enjoy, that allowed Tim to capture their movements.
Tim says some cats were relatively compliant, while others, not surprisingly, were the complete opposite and would disappear across the studio into their cat carrier. 'Even a domestic cat can run about 34-35 mph,' he says, 'which is faster than Usain Bolt in the Olympic 100m final, so they're pretty fast.'
He says that technical advances in today's equipment made the shooting process much easier than it was in the past. 'When I did my book Equus, in 2008, I shot the vast majority of the images using a Hasselblad and manually focusing on the horses,' he says. 'However, for most of the Feline project I used the Canon EOS R5, which meant we had a lot more freedom, because the Animal AF feature recognises domestic cats, among other animals. The fact that the camera automatically tracks the eyes was transformative in the way I worked.
'My main lens was the RF 70-200mm F2.8L IS USM, which was remarkably sharp across the range, and shooting with the mirrorless R5 meant I could focus much closer. I could also shoot with Broncolor flash with a 1/10,000sec duration at 12fps, whereas with the Hasselblad I'd get about one frame per second if I was lucky, so it really opened up new shooting possibilities. It allowed me to be much more responsive to what was unfolding.'
Now Tim can look at the substantial body of work he's produced and see the results of two years' research, travelling, shooting and patiently coaxing uncooperative cats, what does he hope people take away from the book?
He thinks for a few moments before answering, 'The takeaway I hope is that people see it as a celebration of the cat, but at the same time there are lots of things I found on the journey where I've thought, wow, that's interesting, and I hope people share that feeling.
'I might have been trying to unmask the essence of feline, but I wasn't trying to unmask the poetry or the mystery. I was also, as I've always done in my work, celebrating the wonderment of the natural world, collaborating with scientists and giving my own visual take on cats. I hope that marriage has created something unique.'