Leila Jeffreys takes us with this book into a journey through tropical forests and jungles all over the world towards astonishing bird species that she has been taking studio portraits of since 2008: “I’ve long noticed how many birds have specific expressions, just like us”, she explains. Jeffreys’ images, which rely on a profound connection with her sitters cultivated over many years, are an exercise in both artistry and empathy. Cultivating the art of waiting, Jeffreys develops a gallery of whimsical and hyper-realist portraits where all the birds come attired in their most beautiful finery with sumptuous plumage colors. One by one, they let their character shine through: graceful, mischievous, shy, proud, timid, poseur, all of which seem to want to chat to the viewer. Her practice underlines how humans anthropomorphize animals and what we really do share.
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- Des oiseaux
- Leila Jeffreys
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2020
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- Des oiseaux
- Albarrán Cabrera
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2020
The poetic universe of Spanish photographers duo Albarrán Cabrera is presented here through a dreamscape journey in the land of birds. Between reality and illusion, their photographs questions our relationship to the tangible world and vibrate gently through a wide palette and different photographic techniques: platinum and palladium prints, cyanotypes, gelatin prints, and pigmented printing…
Each photograph is like a story that seems to have been paused. The birds seem to be straight out of fantastical fairy tales; they merge into space, are revealed on reflective surfaces, and slip into the undergrowth whereas sometimes their physical presence is underlined by a tight framing. The birds are revealed through abstracting shapes sometimes simple dots and shadows. Albarrán Cabrera leave the interpretation of their images to the memory of the viewer and let our imagination fly.
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- Des oiseaux
- Graciela Iturbide
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2019
A major figure of Latin-American photography, Graciela Iturbide’s approach combines the documentary and the lyrical. Off-center compositions, graphic effects, and heavy shadows create a poetic universe where a feeling of strangeness is combined with one of harsh reality. The powerful equilibrium of her compositions produces skies filled with birds, comical, unexpected situations where chickens are pictured sitting wisely on market stalls, while elsewhere chirping flocks appear to invade the scene in agile, flowing movements. For Iturbide, living birds represent freedom. But death is never far away in her work, nor indeed is a certain sense of the surreal.
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- Des oiseaux
- Michael Kenna
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2019
A master of landscape photography, Michael Kenna’s images reveal a world that is almost evanescent. One where diaphanous light enshrouds nature in mystery, with islands, rivers, and even summits standing out in the distance. “In all of my work there is a certain prevailing theme which has something to do with memory, with time, with change.” Birds soar overhead, tracing aerial figures in fleecy skies, come to rest on a branch, or fly gracefully over hazy expanses of water. Suspended flight, halted moments in time—one that is frozen, immutable.
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- Des oiseaux
- Byung-Hun Min
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2020
Making visible the silence, the simplicity of nature and a sense of passing time. The photographs of Korean Byung-Hun Min, made between 1998 and 2020 throughout he world, take on the evanescence of a pencil sketch. With their subtle contrasts, their play of silky tones, they seem to show a fleeting instant between clarity and dissolution.
Min’s birds live in an ethereal space. They seem enveloped in a white veil, in a silvery light. The virtual monochromy of the image, the uniformity of the tones, oscillating between white and gray, the absence of perspectives and contrasts, the simplicity of the construction and the minimalism of the forms reproduce a reality that has become fantastical. The photographer’s painstaking work printing each negative allows him to reproduce not only what he saw, but also what he perceived. Min’s birds are an invitation to contemplation.
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- Des oiseaux
- Bernard Plossu
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2018
Half traveler and half migratory photographer, as he likes to introduce himself, Bernard Plossu strides along the world since many years. He captures through his lens furtive moments, where birds are flying in huge swarms or caught alone, standing proudly in the middle of a puddle, or gliding high up in the sky, among the peaks. The photographer looks at birds with tenderness and curiosity, a gaze which underlines fantasy and a “surrealistic” approach, as explains the critic Francesco Zanot about his images.
The flight fascinates the photographer, obsessed with the euphoric speed of swallows as well as the hypnotic inertness of large raptors drifting through the wind at high altitude. Plossu’s photographs allow us to see fragments of the world, a world in which birds have reinvested our environment.
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- Des oiseaux
- Pentti Sammallahti
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2018
Traveller-photographer Pentti Sammallahti captures the mysteries of nature on his travels and among these, the world of birds. Coastlines, swamps, parks, endless plains, forest clearings, snowy landscapes… In these isolated areas, birds slyly reveal their presence.
Like visual tales, his B&W photographs attest to his extraordinary eye for detail, to light that sculpts spaces, to silent expanses in which a human or animal presence suddenly appears. The experience of the image is twofold: beyond its narrative virtuosity, his use of a two-colour process, with immaculate whites (as in the plumage of his swans or pink flamingos) confronted with deep blacks, creates a play of textures and powerfully renders a world in which birds play a unique role.
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- Des oiseaux
- Terri Weifenbach
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2019
Created in the space of her personal garden in Washington DC, Terri Weifenbach’s photographs reveal the secret world of nature populated by birds that nest in urban gardens. Oscillating between fantasy and reality, her images seem to be taken on the sly when birds race at top speed, dance, or settle, freeze, and gather in parliaments. The seasons follow in succession, the colours of the garden vary. Saturated light and colour, plays on blurred and crystal-clear details, and freeze frames depict a “supra-reality”. Terri Weifenbach immerses us in the infinitely small, transporting us into a particularly lively and marvelous world.
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- L'Intérieur de la nuit
- George Shiras
- Editions Xavier Barral
- 2015
A keen observer of the animal world and a pioneer of wildlife photography, George Shiras was also the first, at the turn of the 20th century, to reveal the nocturnal lives of forest animals through surprising flash photographs. From mobile shots on his canoe to photographic tricks he developed (when the animal triggers itself the shot by running into a thread), he was able to capture deers, lynx, porcupines, and various birds.
This monographic premiere in an intimist format presents a selection of these photographs, enhanced by a poetic essay by philosopher and writer Jean-Christophe Bailly.
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- 73.128.245.60 / LABOR
- Joseph Moore
- Endless Editions
- 2018
Taking footage from an unsecured surveillance camera in a horse stable, Joseph Moore extracts black and white frames of a mother horse giving birth to a foal. Presented with no timestamps, the stable becomes more claustrophobic with every frame, as Labor raises questions about animal captivity and surveillance.
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- Animal Greetings from the UK
- Alberto Vieceli
- everyedition
- 2019
In "Animal Greetings from the UK", all images have been collected and extracted by Alberto Vieceli from eighty vintage postcards from the United Kingdom. This kind of postcards, that were in use between the 40s and 60s, were in the middle of the postcard cards always decorated with animal photos, mostly cats and dogs.
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- Ao 青
- Charlotte Dumas
- Fw:Books
- 2021
Since 2015 Charlotte Dumas has studied the Japanese island of Yonaguni and the critically-endangered breed of native horses that roam freely across it. A tragic part of the island’s past comes through in her characteristically intimate films and photos. In round glass objects, ballet shoes, or a horse’s girth cloth, a special blue colour recurs to link Japanese nature, the island’s horses, and three young girls, whose spirited independence brings a new energy to Yonaguni.
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- Villa Horsá
- Davida Nemeroff
- Golden Spike Press
- 2016
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- When Elephants Come to Town
- James Attlee
- Hannibal Books
- 2020
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- Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies
- Taryn Simon
- Hatje Cantz
- 2016
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.→more