Photo Gallery
Beauty Contest
A new book presents a pure vision of birds, in glorious color and exquisite detail.
Photography by Andrew Zuckerman/Text by Massimo Vignelli
In John James Audubon’s fabulous drawings of birds, he depicts every detail with great care, feather by feather, with a distinct color for each layer of feathers and great precision with the color and expression in their eyes. He places the birds in their own habitats with equally meticulous consideration. The narrative intention of the drawings is clearly stated; there are no doubts about the author’s goal. He chooses to show the bird in its own environment, and for him, the story is complete.
Audubon belongs to his time. His drawings correspond to the narrative prose of Balzac: equal parts objective and subjective, scientific and romantic, realistic and illusory. Since then, birds have been drawn, painted, and photographed by many artists, but no one has reached the purity of Audubon’s drawings and watercolors. Until now.
Andrew Zuckerman approaches birds with a contemporary, minimalist attitude: no more narrative context, no more psychological interpretations, no more candid shots in the wilderness. An absolute background made of pure white light acts as the field on which the birds fly or rest. In this incredibly luminous setting, the colors of the birds’ plumage come to life as never before seen by the human eye.
It is the light that really gives us that richness of color, that hyperrealist representation of every feather, the crystal clear expression of their eyes, the movement of their wings, and the language of their bodies. While Audubon was interested in the context, Zuckerman wants only the silhouette of the birds against the white background of light: an uncompromising notion of space in which any object becomes its own essence. Each bird can be nothing but that particular bird, the only one with that expression, that body language, and those colors.
Every aspect of the body has been captured by the camera: the beak, the legs, the feet, the wings, the tails, the eyes—and each part stands for the whole bird within that beautiful light.
The birds, from the intimacy of the very small to the majesty of the very large, acquire a transcendental dignity, each one becoming a god in its own universe. The powerful white light transfers its own intensity to the birds and transforms them into mythical objects of paradise, newly resplendent in all their colors.
Zuckerman knows very well the power of that light. As with his previous books, he is able to present the usual in the most unusual way by aiming at the essence, rather than the appearance, of the subject. The pages flow throughout the book as a cinematic sequence, teasing the viewer through a window into the limitless white world.
Once again he has created a masterpiece, an unforgettable document of those beautiful creatures who fly away to elude our gaze.
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Victoria crowned-pigeon
A flashy regal crest and masked red-orange eyes befit this sociable but laid-back bird, which spends its days on the forest floor looking for food. Despite unknown population estimates, logging and hunting in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea have made the species vulnerable to decline. Hunters seek both the pigeon’s feathers and its meat.
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Roseate spoonbill
The oar-shaped beak of the aptly named roseate spoonbill doesn’t just look cool; it actually serves a purpose, helping the wading species spoon up small food from the water below. While it may appear the flamingo’s doppelganger, the two species share little besides their blush-tinted hue, and come from different families altogether. |
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Inca tern
It’s hard to miss this gull cousin, with its snow-white curlicue moustache. The ornament, prominently displayed during mating, actually indicates reproductive strength; the longer the moustache, the stronger the bird. The extraction of guano—bird excrement used as fertilizer—disturbs nesting colonies off Peru and poses a real threat.
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Blue-fronted Amazon
Since the early 1980s, when the blue-fronted Amazon was listed in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna, CITES has confirmed more than 400,000 seized from the wild. Despite their popularity as pets, these birds, which have at least nine different vocalizations, are neither endangered nor threatened.
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King bird-of-paradise
At only six inches long, the male king bird-of-paradise pales in size to its larger New Guinea brethren. What it lacks in bulk is offset by its rainbow physique: a red, orange, and yellow head, green neck and tail-streamer feathers, and blue feet. Plus, the less colorful females tend to the species’ tree-cavity nests.
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Red-legged seriema
Run, don’t fly, from a threat. That’s the unofficial motto of the red-legged seriema, which can travel short distances in the air but prefers darting from predators at 15 miles per hour. Above all, these birds, one of just two species in the South American Cariamidae family, favor ambling from meal to meal and performing duets to showcase their distinctive yelplike calls.
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