Bird photography has come a long way since John Dillwyn Llewelyn propped a stuffed heron (the exposure took 20 minutes, so it had to stand still…) in a pond and pressed snap back in 1856. Aviary focuses its gaze on the 21st century, during which digital photography has exponentially leapfrogged itself from clunky, pixelated beginnings into a kind of hyperreal dreamworld. Once, photographs allowed us to hold something still so that we could look at it again; now they reveal much more than we could ever see with our eyes alone.
Spanish photographer Xavi Bou crafts images by combining multiple frames into a single image. Ornithography #240, Sturnus Vulgaris, 2022, shows a flock of common starling, the flight paths of individual birds visible as dotted lines. The murmuration takes the shape of a giant, smudged fingerprint against the sky, revealing its mathematical inner workings.
But there are nods to the stillness of Llewelyn’s stationary heron too. Luke Stephenson’s Blackbird #1 (Cock), 2019, is set up in a studio, and shot side-on against a slaty ground. The bird’s yellow-rimmed eye glistens patiently while we are invited to peel back and pick at every detail. Once you notice its reptilian feet, the realisation hits: it’s a garden-variety velociraptor!
Bearded Reedling, 2013, by Michel d’Oultremont is pure poetry, the facing pages first showing the tiny acrobat dangling from a stalk of grass as if trying to dip a quill-tip into a pot of ink, then hidden in a tuft, snoozing inside a snug duvet.
The book’s 223 mostly colour photographs are arranged in six ‘acts’ – possibly unnecessarily so since the ‘multifaceted theatricality’ of the birds (and photographs) soon find their own visual fluency. Aviary frees its subjects from the conventional constraints of field guides and documentary-style coffee-table books. Street, fashion, wildlife and staged portrait photography collide and get along on these pages like distant cousins who meet up to find they’ve had the same favourite band all along.
Tim Flach’s Northern Cardinal, 2021, looks like a White Stripes album cover, Randal Ford’s Bantam White Polish Hen, 2024, is all Balenciaga winter collection, while Roger Ballen and Charles Fréger respectively bring in the sinister and the mythical to the bird party.
The book pops and whistles, particularly when images are juxtaposed: Chloe Bowman’s Azura Rosella, 2018, shows an upside-down museum specimen of a parrot, mimicking Stefan Christmann’s emperor penguin, plunging head first towards a glassy sea. Elsewhere, cocksure chickens (by Anastasia Samoylova) stroll down a Miami street opposite Andrew Garn’s homage to the pigeons of New York, the ‘flying rat’ cosied up on a windowsill with a brooding Empire State Building behind. This sense of intimacy is ruffled as you turn the page to find Yoshinori Mizutani’s monochromes of birds queued up like commuters on electrical wires: distant, less knowable.
The authors want us to appreciate the art but also to consider our relationship with birds. As habitats shrink, we are inching more species into ever tinier environmental niches. The bearded reedling has an estimated population size of three million across Eurasia. Sounds like a lot? When European settlers arrived in North America, there were more than three billion passenger pigeons across the continent. By 1914, they were all gone. Aviary hails the bird – it is our job to see it and treasure it.
