Here are the absolute best cat photos you’ll see on the internet today

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was once asked to state a use of the internet that he had not foreseen – he replied with one word… ‘kittens’. The popularity of cats online is now little surprise to anyone, as platforms like YouTube host tens of millions of cat videos and have created feline social media superstars like Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub. The New York Times once described cat photographs as, ‘that essential building block of the internet’ and the word ’cat’ is regularly amongst the most popular keywords searched online.     

The world has had several famous photographers who were known for their distinctive portraits of pets, most notably Elliott Erwitt for dogs and Walter Chandoha for cats. But a new, no-frills book from Hoxton Mini Press, titled New Photography of the Cat, lifts the lid on and showcases a fresh batch of 25 different cat-based photography projects, plus one AI-generated set of images.

The book ranges from photographer Nguan shooting so-called ‘community cats’ with film cameras in his native Singapore (where it was, till recently, illegal for residents of public housing estates to own cats as pets) to the street cats of Istanbul and the more traditional approach of studio shoots with single colour backgrounds. It includes the work of photographers from the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the US, Japan, UK, Singapore, Lithuania and other countries. Interestingly, many of them have backgrounds in fashion photography, still-life or studio work, so their images of cats are, forgive the pun, more like pet projects.

The mixture of images in the book includes some surreal thinking, as in the case of ‘Magnus Cattus’ by US photographer Matt McCarthy, who imagined what it might be like to be in a highly Photoshopped world where the apex predators were cats. Aside from what I think is the unnecessary addition of a short section of AI cat images from the creative house Graphic Thought Facility, which feels like it was tagged on at the end, there are also much more conventional projects such as documenting street cats and cats with their human owners.

Within the 26 projects in the book, Lola Dupre was inspired by the legendary French art director Jean-Paul Goude’s cut-up work for the cover of Grace Jones’s 1985 studio LP Slave to the Rhythm and applied it to her rescue cat Charlie. The result is a series of images that take parts of copies of the same image that are then cut-up, stretched and warped to create a fresh piece of art. Dupre reveals, ‘Cats make great subject matter because of the perfect, impossible forms they comfortably create’.        

Eye-catching cat portraits also include the freeze-frame techniques of US photographer Carli Anderson. Anderson shoots at shutter speeds of up to 1/13,000th of a second at up to 10 frames per second and was inspired by the Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who famously used sequential cameras to prove that horses lift all four of their legs off the ground when running.

Another visually striking idea is Norwegian fashion photographer Dag Knudsen’s ‘Symmetricat’ series, which he created by shooting parts of cats and matching them up to make purely symmetrical final images. Symmetricat came out of a 2017 fashion shoot for a New York magazine, when a Sphynx cat was a co-model. Knudsen explains, ‘He was very comfortable in front of the camera, literally posing for the pictures. I made a symmetrical version of him and immediately decided to make a series [of photographs]’.        

You don’t have to be a cat lover, though it helps, to enjoy New Photography of the Cat as it contains a potent combination of superb photography, and the backstories behind the projects, to satisfy anyone who appreciates the world of creative images.     

New Photography of the Cat, written by Lucy Davies, is published by Hoxton Mini Press in hardcover, 208 pages, (ISBN: 978-1-914314-94-0), RRP £16.95.