In 2021, I had a project I called “birb stalker”. It was kind of a weird project. I was interested in taking “paparazzi” photos of birds, in which they were potentially partially obscured, etc, to emphasize the role of the photographer and that photos always are part of some physical context, which in many cases we try to omit. I had a couple fuzzy thoughts circling my head at the time:
- I grew up exposed to celebrity culture, but personally never got much out of it. But what might it look like to elevate individual birds in that way?1
- I had gotten a long lens somewhat recently (400mm micro four-thirds) and thought the “telephoto” look was interesting.
- I was thinking about a photography book I read awhile ago called Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife by James Balog. It’s a really beautiful book that takes deliberately studio-portrait-style photos of animals, with white backdrops and props. It’s deliberately non-“wild” to show the artifice of “wildlife” photos with the litter cropped out, and the impact of humans on the environment. I felt like that taking pictures that made the position of the photographer more apparent had kind of a similar effect to call attention to the artifice.
The intended form of this “piece” is as a collage.
We can also see each individual photo.
This piece unfortunately does not fully answer that question. There is certainly room here for additional research. ↩︎