Untitled (Companions)

Anika Steppe | Chicago, Illinois, USA

When we think about community, we often only think about humans. A 2017 study reported in Scientific American found that “people with pets were generally more likely than those without to get to know others in the neighborhood” and that dogs were particularly good sources of “social lubricants, prompting conversations and interactions between otherwise strangers.”10 Historically, people were discouraged from developing emotional attachments to animals and the keeping of pets was seen as a frivolous habit of the elite.11 In the Victo - rian Era, this changed and pet ownership developed a “moral value”, a way to develop the good character of children. In more recent years, communities have become more attuned to the infrastructure needs of pet ownership. While now a somewhat ubiquitous part of the urban landscape, the first dog park, Ohlone Dog Park in Berkeley, California, wasn’t built until 2000 and only after a forty-year campaign of a dedicated community activist, Doris Richards.12 Anika Steppe considers the place of companion animals in communities using photographs of people and their pets found in the archive. She writes: “I searched for dogs within Henry Sheldon Museum’s Stewart-Swift Research Center digital collections. I was met with 117 results. Tucked in intermittently, ranging from the years 1890- 1960, are a handful of photographs, each featuring a white ‘young woman’ or ‘girl’ sitting on grass surrounded by animals. The women and animals are never identified by name. Rather, the provided descriptions detail the proximity and physical relation to one another: a sheep looks upwards at a dog, a young girl pets a dog, a cat lies in the grass close to the girl and her dog. “In Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, she writes, ‘I believe that all ethical relating, within or between species, is knit from the silk-strong thread of ongoing alertness to otherness-in-relation. We are not one, and being depends on getting on together.’13 I didn’t find a historical moment within the archive, I don’t think I was looking for one. I found small moments that visualize what Haraway calls ‘partial-connections’ and ‘contingent foundations’; solitary figures existing disjointly but distinctly together. On patches of grass.”