Photographer Focuses On Aging Animals

Getting the elderly animals’ pictures meant getting to know them at ground level.

In Isa Leshko’s book-length collection of photographs published this week by University of Chicago Press, you will meet many intriguing characters. They share a quiet country lifestyle and they are all happily retired.

The pastoral setting of Allowed to Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries contrasts with the harsh conditions where Isa Leshko’s subjects earlier found themselves. Abe the Goat, Babs the Donkey, Teresa the Pig, and others, had all suffered abuse and neglect before they were rescued and given the chance to live out their lives unmolested.

For the photographer, getting the animals’ pictures meant getting to know them at ground level. And when she got back up, Isa Leshko discovered she had a book.

“It was important to me that I treat these images as portraits,” Leshko tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “I photographed them at eye-level even though it meant contorting my body and lying in animal scat. It was less important that the image be beautiful and much more a portrait of Teresa, a rescued pig, that I had spent hours getting to know.”