.

Rare Birds

Rare Birds is made up from several sequences of photos that deal with the idea of perception and how many people tend to look at a photograph and believe what they see is real.  These photographs ostensibly document birds outdoors in their natural environment.  Documentary photography is commonly thought to capture unmediated realities, to record or demonstrate sometimes unnoticed aspects of everyday places or events.  From the birth of photography the camera has been accepted as, primarily, a documentary device, a tool like a pen.  And even though a photograph may not capture “reality”, it is a picture of the world as it was seen and recorded by the photographer. It is evidence.
 

Each bird sequence has been photographed outdoors in a foggy or overcast environment.  I have taken the photos with a shallow depth of field, the light is soft and diffused.  The style evokes the Pictorialists’ photographs of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in terms of the balance that their work achieved between documentary and artifice.  Each photo has been made with consideration to aesthetic and technical choices.  At first it isn’t obvious that the birds aren’t real.  But, if you spend any time with the photos you will start to see oddities that become visible.  In 'bird-watch' and 'feigned feathers' a repetition of similar bird shapes and various props and wires start to stand out, and in Salt and Pepper Prints you may realize that the graininess of the photos could be something more than the granular particles of the photographic emulsion.

These photographs speak to the history of photography and photographic manipulation.  Even though photographical manipulation dates back to the early 1860s, the advent of digital cameras and editing software has prompted renewed scepticism regarding the legitimacy of images. Many people say that as long as you can provide a negative, then the photo is deemed real… The authority of representation is a powerful tool.  I hope that these photos will draw the viewer in, and invite a second look.