Isabella Rozendaal realised there was something missing from Amsterdam’s population archive. She tells of her life – and new book – as the city’s first official pet portraitist • See a gallery of Isabella Rozendaal’s photographs

In 2016, the photographer Isabella Rozendaal convinced Amsterdam’s city archives that a significant portion of the city’s inhabitants were being unfairly snubbed. Rozendaal was born in Amsterdam, and, when she is not travelling on assignment, she still lives there. Like other Amsterdammers, she considers the archives an invaluable resource – the public collection of historical documents (drawings, films, maps, photographs) is the largest in the world – but whenever she visited she always sensed something was missing. “Pets are a huge part of Amsterdam’s population,” Rozendaal says, “but they were totally underrepresented. My plan was to photograph the pets.”

Rozendaal began photographing animals in 2006, during her last year of art school. (She studied at the Royal Academy of Art, in The Hague.) To sharpen her documentary skills, she visited a dog show, where she was drawn not just to the animals but to candid moments shared between the pets and their owners. Rozendaal asked a couple of owners if she could visit them later, at home. She wanted to better understand how pet and owner interacted out of the public eye. “I just thought these people were so fascinating,” she says. “And I found this wonderful obsession.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Beest, age three, a savannah cat. Photograph: Isabella Rozendaal

When Rozendaal approached the archive authorities, she already had a significant collection of portraits to illustrate her intention. “I could show them this wasn’t about cute kitties,” she says. Her plan was to take portraits of Amsterdam’s animals “as individuals”, in order to “elevate them above their role as objects”. She had become interested in pet-based services – cremations, acupuncture, animal ambulances – and what their existence says about the human condition. She thought: what if I can take a picture of a pet and simultaneously create a portrait of its owner? “Show a little bit of the surroundings. Show a little bit of the house. Show how the animal is groomed or clothed,” she says. “Sometimes that can say a lot about the human.”

The archives, which provide three photographic grants a year, agreed to Rozendaal’s proposal and she became Amsterdam’s pet portraitist. A friend introduced her to a vet who sometimes sourced pets for television work; when an unusual animal visited the surgery, Rozendaal would receive a call. She began to photograph birds, cats, horses, pigs, snails, rabbits, and rats, mostly in domestic environments. Even walking through Amsterdam became a kind of safari. “I’d run into someone on the street and say, ‘Hey, your dog looks awesome!’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spekkie, age two, a miniature pig. Photograph: Isabella Rozendaal

A selection of her portraits are now published in a book, Animalia Amsterdam, whose cover star is a longhaired Scottish fold cat named Dirkie, who is big on social media. The picture is emblematic of Rozendaal’s approach: it is at once a portrait of a pet, its owner (who appears only at the periphery of the frame), the relationship they share, and the environment in which they live. It is unvarnished, sincere, and vaguely funny, much like Rozendaal’s other pictures. In one, a domestic duck plucks the eyelid of its owner. In another, a cat peers into a box-full of ashes, the remains of a beloved horse, whose portrait hangs on the wall above. Snails feature prominently in the series, in one sliding across its owner’s cheek. Rozendaal had a go. “Feels nice,” she says. “Like cold cucumbers.”

Her work for the archives has now ended. She delivered 22 pictures, now stored for posterity, and is now working on her first museum solo show, at the Fotomuseum den Haag, in February, where she’ll show pictures from a series on animal hunting. But she has found it difficult to stop photographing pets. An exhibition of her portraits is currently travelling around Holland. The Amsterdam daily Het Parool publishes a new portrait every week. And exciting candidates appear regularly. “It has been a way into parts of society I would otherwise never see,” she says. “These people are so different from me. Different interests. Different lifestyles. But now I talk to them all day. And we just talk about those pets.”

Animalia Amsterdam (€25) is available at isabellarozendaal.com

@alex_moshakis