Pounce by Seth Casteel
My rating: 5/5 cats
THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT CATS WHO ARE POUNCING!
it’s also a book by the guy who gave us such gifts as Underwater Dogs, Underwater Puppies, and Underwater Babies. so, why did he abandon the theme this time?
here’s why:
For a while now I’ve been excited to make a photography book about cats. But to answer the question I am asked most often: after an extensive worldwide search for “cats who willingly dive into swimming pools,” I found approximately zero participants. So unless something radically changes with the behavior of cats around water, Underwater Cats is permanently on hold.
so instead, there is pouncing.
i mean, sometimes.
sometimes there isn’t even that. some of these cats are just chilling out, looking like they might want to pounce, but they’re not gonna do it just for you, seth casteel.
he addresses the difficulty of not only finding cats who will jump into water, but cats who will be photographed at all:
cats are mercurial.
in any event, the photography is excellent, and much better in the actual book than after the process of me slapping them up on here
some of them have such amazing composition, you have to marvel at how they could even have been taken without any of that photoshop cheatery
and then there are some cats that are just…. weird.
what are those cats even doing?
whatever the heck they wanna do, because they are cats and they do as they please.
whether they wanna come straight for ya
or yell
or show off their toe-beans
and their tiny little teeth
or look very very sad
or swat
or even – yes -pounce
all of the cats photographed here were available for adoption through animal shelters or rescue groups, but now that the book is out, they’ve probably all been snatched up. which makes this book a hero, even though its title is a little bit of a fib.
