Knox was taking out the garbage five years ago when he first saw them. Four little heads peeked up over the Dumpster behind his Norcross recording studio. And then they were gone.

Knox, who goes by one name, kept his eyes peeled. Like the Whac-a-Mole game at a carnival, these quicksilver heads kept popping up, popping down.

Photos by Knox (ENLARGE)

A sympathetic photographer captured these images of feral cats near his Norcross studio. He finds homes for those he can and has others neutered.

(ENLARGE)

Photographer Knox says he can identify with the cats. He was homeless years ago when he was in thrall to drugs and alcohol.

He set out tins of food.

He gave them names.

He brought his camera.

An art photographer as well as a sound producer, Knox has just published these images in a book, "Urban Tails: Inside the Hidden World of Alley Cats" (New World Library, $19.95). Atlanta writer Sara Neeley contributed the text, based on Knox's riveting stories of these animals' lives and deaths on the streets.

By the time Knox started taking pictures, he was no longer a dispassionate observer. He was a little in love with these street creatures. He started naming them.

There was Tiger, the most ferocious kitten from a litter of four and the only one he could lure into his lap. Hairless Possum and lustrous Queenie, two litter mates who revolved around each other like synchronous stars — even after they became mothers. Nemesis, the wary orange-and-white patriarch of the tribe, who would approach the group only when he was searching for a mate. He preferred to hunt rodents but deigned to accept Knox's charity when he was starving.

Knox wasn't merely observing these feral cats. Something else was going on. He was identifying with them. He knew what it was like to live on the streets — surviving on smarts, garbage and handouts. He's been there.

Knox has been clean for 15 years, but when he was abusing drugs and alcohol, he was homeless in New York City.

Still, he doesn't want to talk about that, because the daily terrors he faced were nothing compared with what these cats have endured. Coyotes prowl nearby, he says, and walk up the driveway "like it's a buffet." After an attack, the animals caterwaul in grief. Mothers adopt orphaned kittens. Knox runs off the coyotes when he can, but he won't kill an animal. He can't.

Knox knows the street is a terrible place for any creature to live. So he finds homes for the cats that accept domestication. The others he captures and has neutered before rereleasing them to their street gang.

Some neighbors are sick of the cats. One suggested that Knox gather them up in a sack and drown them. He thinks this attitude shows the neighbor's prejudice. These cats have feelings. They've been through so much. They deserve to live.

Plus, they've been a kind of blessing for Knox. He has been in recovery for 15 years, but not always happy. He wasn't feeling emotionally well when he saw the cats poking out from behind the Dumpster and in the months after, when he began feeding them, protecting them from attacks and making sure they stopped reproducing.

"I was so down and depressed," he says, "but then I realized all along they were looking after me."