In 1936, an American ornithologist named James Bond published the definitive taxonomy Birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming, an active bird-watcher living in Jamaica, appropriated the name for his novel’s lead character. He found it “flat and colourless,” a fitting choice for a character intended to be “anonymous. . . a blunt instrument in the hands of the government.”
In Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies, Taryn Simon (*1975) casts herself as James Bond (1900–1989) the ornithologist, and identifies, photographs, and classifies all the birds that appear within the twenty-four films of the James Bond franchise. The appearance of many of the birds was unplanned and virtually undetected, operating as background noise for whatever set they happened to fly into. Simon’s ornithological discoveries occupy a liminal space—confined within the fiction of the James Bond universe and yet wholly separate from it. This taxonomy of 331 birds is a precise consideration of a new nature found in an alternate reality.
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- Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies
- Taryn Simon
- Hatje Cantz
- 2016
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- Appetite for the Magnificent
- Tania Willen, David Willen, Jörg Scheller
- Edition Patrick Frey
- 2017
Appetite for the Magnificent is a photographic and essayistic exploration of the history and present-day world of the aquarium. David and Tania Willen focus their lenses on the pictorial, aesthetic dimension of present-day aquariums in Swiss zoos and Switzerland’s high-end aquarium scene: public and private labs in which “aquascapers” design animal-vegetable-mineral gardens of aqueous delights. These moving-picture aquascapes float between the poles of reality and virtuality, presence and absence, the animate and inanimate world. The fish swimming around in the tank may be present as living, breathing creatures, and yet we also perceive them through the glass as images of fish. In the Willens’ photographs, all shot from the front, the fish seem suspended in mid-air, an effect that brings to the fore the virtual side of the aquarium: it is nothing short of a precursor to the television set.
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- Trails
- Takashi Homma
- MACK
- 2009
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- Pet Pictures
- Stephen Shore
- One Picture Books
- 2012
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- Night Procession
- Stephen Gill
- Nobody Books
- 2020
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- Pigeons
- Stephen Gill
- Nobody Books
- 2014
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- The Pillar
- Stephen Gill
- Nobody Books
- 2019
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- Das Tier und sein Mensch
- Stefan Moses
- Sanssouci Verlag
- 1997
Was eine Katze tut, wenn sie fotografiert wird, kann man sich vorstellen: sie stellt die Schnurrhaare auf, putzt sich und legt sich in Positur. Aber ein Kamel, das mit hocherhobenem Kopf über eine Menschenmenge hinweg dem Fotografen zuzuzwinkern scheint? Stefan Moses hat aus seinem Archiv die schönsten Bilder über das Verhältnis zwischen Mensch und Tier ausgewählt. Seine zarten, aber nie kitschigen Bilder fügen sich zusammen mit ausgewählten Tiergedichten der Weltliteratur zu einem einzigartigen Band für jeden Tierliebhaber.
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- Tokyo Debugger
- Shinya Arimoto
- Zen Foto Gallery
- 2020
Shinya Arimoto’s third publication with Tokyo-based publisher Zen Foto Gallery is a deep dive into the world of bugs, critters and insects. Shot between 2010 and 2019, Arimoto travelled to the mountainous areas of Okutama and Hinohara – far away from the city but still part of Tokyo Prefecture – to capture moths, mantises, worms, spiders, snakes, frogs and other animals up close. Brilliantly, Arimoto intersperses photographs of abandoned architecture as traces of past human activity, widening the scope of his series. For Arimoto, the city of Tokyo and these mountainous areas belong to different sides of the same coin, and insects – beings that clearly belong to a different realm of nature than us – transcend the boundaries between these sides, free to move back and forth between the two. Arimoto captured another world within Tokyo, dominated by the most successful creatives on the planet, unimpressed by the ongoing sprawl of the asphalt and cement megalopolis.
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- Animals
- Sage Sohier
- STANLEY/BARKER
- 2019
Sage Sohier grew up with four dogs, and currently lives with three. Animals have always been important in her life; so, when she started photographing people in the late 1970s, she often included their companion animals.
“There is more spontaneity, less self-consciousness, and more chaos when humans and other animals coexist. Love is unconditional, grief is uncomplicated though deeply felt, and life is richer, more vivid, more comical.”
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- bird
- Roni Horn
- Steidl
- 2008
bird presents the culmination of Roni Horn’s long-running photographic series of taxidermied Icelandic wildfowl. Photographed at close range against white backgrounds (as though obeying the conventional format of studio portraiture) the birds are viewed from behind, their unique physiognomies and markings resulting in inscrutable shapes and patterns on the photographs’ surfaces.
Despite the singular form of the title, the birds in this series are presented in pairs, images that are hung side by side one another highlighting the differences and similarities between the two. The gesture of doubling — as an aesthetic and conceptual strategy — has been a recurrent motif for Horn since 1980, a tool that invites careful scrutiny from the viewer, altering the dynamic of the work. Horn’s images are accompanied by a text by the writer and curator Philip Larratt-Smith. Avoiding a dense, didactic reading of the series, Larratt-Smith has compiled an extended series of quotes, anecdotes and idioms, garnered from film, literature, photographers’ monographs and Horn’s own writings.
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- A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World
- Robert Zhao Renhui
- Steidl
- 2018
To what extent can we trust photography and science? Robert Zhao Renhui explores these questions in A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World, which appears to be an authentic catalogue of plants and animals but is in fact entirely fictitious.
Renhui’s guide ostensibly “documents” 55 different animals, plants and environments that have been manipulated by man but do not appear to be, and examines the myriad ways in which humans are altering nature. Here are curious creatures that have evolved in often unexpected ways to cope with our changing world, including rhinoceroses with barely visible horns and monkeys dependent on food handed out by humans. Other organisms in the series are the products of human intervention, mutations engineered to serve various purposes from scientific research to the desire for ornamentation, such as man-made gelatin grapes, genetically modified tomatoes and “unbreakable” eggs.
All living things constantly adapt to the various pressures they face including predators, pollution and environmental change. Yet the human species has undeniably emerged as the main perpetrator of the dangers that threaten the survival of other life forms. A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World reminds us of this fact, and above all to retain a critical, cautious and ironic attitude to the “real.”
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- Mynas
- Robert Zhao Renhui
- The Institute of Critical Zoologists
- 2016
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- Des oiseaux
- Rinko Kawauchi
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2021
This new series by Rinko Kawauchi celebrates the tenth title in the collection Des oiseaux. The Japanese photographer focused on swallows in Spring during birthing season in her neighborhood in the city of Chiba and, in particular, on the tiny nests that the birds build in window openings or in the underside of roofs, in order to protect their broods, which are fed by their parents for several weeks. Fascinated by this spectacle, with her characteristic poetry and sense of detail, Rinko Kawauchi brings out the marvelous in our daily lives and the ephemeral beauty of suspended moments. The swallows, thanks to their sharp wings, perch everywhere with ease and elegance, bathed in an opalescent light.
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- Turn Down Center Line
- Pernilla Zetterman
- Kerber Verlag
- 2017
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