Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1430630
While running over the Millennium Bridge toward the Tate Modern, a path I take most mornings from my home in London, I am greeted by hundreds of roosting black-headed gulls flanking me on both sides. This cacophony of seabirds transports me back to my childhood by the Cornish coast and stirs me into action for the day ahead. When I began this project, my intention was to explore the beauty and wonderment of birds by depicting them in a series of portraits, abstract and in flight. They are set against simple backgrounds to focus on the details and illustrate their morphological diversity, and heighten our sense of empathy. Our journey within the pages of the book, from which the photographs in the exhibition are selected, is ordered in what is believed to be the evolutionary sequence, beginning with the Berlin Archaeopteryx, a strikingly complete example of a feathered dinosaur that gives us a direct link to the ancestors of birds today. This is followed by flightless birds, through to the more specialized species such as hummingbirds, and finally to poultry—domesticated and shaped by us. To craft the chapter introductions, Yale University's Richard O. Prum, a leading evolutionary ornithologist and world-renowned expert on plumage, was the perfect fit. His knowledge and approach accentuate why these birds have such unique plumages, colorations, and forms. Where necessary, specialized aviaries were built to allow my subjects to be more relaxed, oblivious to the camera and me. This encouraged natural behaviour and most importantly minimized any stress on these captive-bred birds. In some situations, turntables were used for rotating perches, ponds were built for ducks, and lights were suspended high over a tank of diving penguins. For many of us, the global pandemic has heightened our awareness of nature and specifically birds, which have with their very presence awakened our senses and elevated our spirits. The enforced solitude of lockdown has also given me an opportunity to reflect on my photographic processes and glean new inspiration from the old masters such as Rembrandt and Turner; I have become ever more mindful of the importance of the chiaroscuro and luminescence that they used to such great effect. From the beginning I was aware of the legacy of the nineteenth-century bird illustrators such as John James Audubon and his The Birds of America, and the artists employed by John Gould. More often than not, they had to work using only skins and taxidermy specimens. Artists like Edward Lear did their best to observe directly from life where possible. I like to think I work on the continuum of this aesthetic tradition. What photography can do uniquely as a medium is to fragment a single moment in time, thereby extending our experience of that moment, which the persistent flow of movement and therefore I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y T I M F L A C H T O B I R D S , T H E N E W B O O K A N D G A L L E R Y E X H I B I T I O N