In the past couple of years, looking for ways to depict a different kind of relationship between humans and the natural world, the German photographer Yana Wernicke has spent time at two animal rescue projects. In each place, young women – named as Rosina and Julie – have saved farm animals from slaughter and modelled an alternative possibility. Wernicke’s book of pictures from those projects, called Companions in English, depicts their kinship and tenderness across species boundaries. The German title of her book captures this spirit better – Weggefährten – a compound word that literally translates as “those who walk the path together”.
Images such as this one, which invite you to look at animals in profound or surprising attitudes, are typical. Cattle, prime economic units in a global food industry, are central to this story. Wernicke takes inspiration from John Berger’s thought-provoking essay Why Look at Animals? Other recent reference points would be Rosamund Young’s The Secret Life of Cows, which revealed how individual animals formed playful bonds of friendship and loyalty within a herd, and Andrea Arnold’s eye-opening film Cow, which documented the whole life of a dairy animal, a being with its own biography and emotion, its own time and space.
Why this sudden collective attention? Berger called it an expression of “species loneliness”, a yearning for a greater depth of connection with fellow mammals. We have, since the Industrial Revolution, he suggested, lost the engagement with the spirit of the animals that we have always lived most closely alongside, a mutuality that he traced back to the first cave paintings: “Animals,” he suggested, “are now always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.” Wernicke’s photographs are an attempt to reinhabit that older order; they are about being looked at, as well as looking.
