Des oiseaux

Graciela Iturbide, a leading figure in Latin American photography, creates images that oscillate between documentary approach and lyricism. Off-center framing, graphic effects and the power of shadows create a poetic universe where the feeling of strangeness mixes with that of a raw reality. The powerful balance of his compositions shows skies saturated with birds, funny and unexpected situations where chickens are waiting quietly on market stalls, where pigeons are fighting with monkeys, and where elsewhere there are moving swarms that look like real living organisms with supple and fluid movements. For Iturbide, living birds represent freedom. But death is never far away and neither is a certain surrealist spirit. From India to Mexico, from waterfronts to urban terraces, seagulls, eagles, pigeons, herons, crows invade human space or slip in unexpectedly and solitarily. Graciela Iturbide’s birds arouse both attraction and repulsion: their fragility but sometimes also their power.

This book is part of the collection Des oiseaux which celebrates, through the eyes of different artists, their immense presence in a world where they are nowadays fragile. Ornithologist Guilhem Lesaffre offers an original essay to accompany each set of photographs. Other titles in the collection include: Michael Kenna, Yoshinori Mizutani, Bernard Plossu, Pentti Sammallahti and Terri Weifenbach.