Let’s admit it: cats are ridiculously photogenic. They know their angles, refuse to cooperate, and somehow manage to look dramatic while doing absolutely nothing. The internet figured this out a long time ago.

But for the photographers below, cats are doing something more interesting than just looking good in a frame. They become companions, reminders of home, stand-ins for people who can’t be photographed, and sometimes the starting point for an entire body of work. Across Iran, Syria, Jordan and beyond, these photographers have used cats to talk about grief, displacement, personality and the strange realities of everyday life.

When Sami Uçan moved to Istanbul in 2012, cats weren’t actually the plan. He was photographing the city itself: its old walls, mosques and Ottoman tombstones, treating Istanbul almost like an open-air museum. Then, while looking back through his photographs, he started noticing something else in the frame. Cats. Everywhere (you know!).

At first they were simply hanging around the cemeteries and slipping into his compositions. But then, they changed the way Uçan photographed the city altogether. The stillness of the tombstones gave way to something much less predictable: cats walking into the frame, disappearing behind walls, sitting beside strangers or occupying a piece of architecture as though it had been built specifically for them.

Eventually, Uçan began going out specifically to find them. He describes Istanbul’s cats as his “photographic partners”, and says he can no longer imagine the city without them. For him, they belong to Istanbul in much the same way as its sea, minarets, domes and seagulls do — not as decoration, but as part of its character and everyday rhythm.

Years of photographing them became Kedi, his 2018 photo book dedicated to Istanbul’s street cats. His images don’t really separate the cats from the city around them: there are people, pavements, shops, historic buildings and unexpected little encounters. The cat just happens to be the character that pulls everything together.

Syrian photographer Hussein Haddad was working in Damascus before the war, photographing the city and thinking about photography as a way of holding on to memory. Later, after leaving Syria, ideas of home and displacement inevitably entered his work. And in Refugee Cats, he approaches those enormous subjects through something surprisingly small and familiar: a pet.

The series follows the stories of five Syrian refugees through their cats — some animals travelled with their owners, while others had to be left behind. Haddad deliberately connects the domestic cat with the idea of home. A cat belongs to the everyday version of a place: the sofa, the kitchen, the balcony, feeding time, the animal waiting for you to return.

There is also something very specific about the question at the centre of the project: what happens to the ordinary parts of your life when suddenly nothing is ordinary anymore? A pet doesn't understand borders or paperwork. It only knows its person and its home.

The work was created through the British Council’s Andو programme for displaced Syrian artists and is dedicated to Haddad’s friend Muthna Hamzawi.

Robert Bahou was born and raised in Amman and grew up surrounded by animals. His family would take animals in and later rehome them, so being around them was never particularly unusual. Photographing them as seriously as he might photograph a person came later.

And a cat called Scuba had quite a lot to do with it. Scuba belonged to a friend and, judging by his most famous portrait, was not particularly thrilled about becoming a model. Bahou remembers setting up the photograph, putting him in a chair and eventually getting a few seconds when the cat looked directly into the lens. The resulting portrait — Scuba staring at the camera with an expression somewhere between suspicion and profound irritation — became one of the images that pushed Bahou towards Animal Soul.

The project eventually grew into a substantial collection of portraits of cats and dogs. Bahou's approach was deliberately simple: no costumes, no funny poses, no attempt to make the animals perform cuteness for us. Instead, he used dark backgrounds and close compositions, trying to look at them as individuals.

He also photographed the animals in their homes to keep them comfortable and reduce distractions. With cats, that occasionally gave him an advantage: rather than being intimidated by a new studio, they could simply investigate the strange man who had appeared in their territory with a camera.

And Scuba? Bahou later photographed him again, but apparently the mood had changed. The cat had eaten, relaxed and lost some of that gloriously annoyed expression. Proof, perhaps, that even a great model has one perfect shoot in them.

Caro Mirzoyan's Absolute: Tehran Cats begins with a wonderfully simple photographic problem: what can you photograph when photographing people becomes too risky?

Mirzoyan made the work in Tehran in January and February 2025. According to the project description, pointing a camera at people in the city's streets could quickly attract attention, suspicion or confrontation. So the camera moved downwards. And there were cats! One became two; eventually there were 116 of them.

The resulting project may be called Tehran Cats, but Mirzoyan is quite explicit that it isn't really about cat photography. The animals are witnesses. By appearing again and again across the city, they map what the photographer was still able to look at when other subjects had effectively become off-limits.

Mirzoyan experimented with a thermal-paper camera and later printed images onto discarded receipt paper collected from shops and streets. That means the cats appear alongside bits of Farsi, prices, numbers and traces of everyday transactions.

The project has since been selected for a public installation at PhMuseum Days 2026 in Bologna, where the cats will move from Tehran's streets onto eleven outdoor billboards.