Amazing wildlife photography by Kathryn Cooper reveals the brushwork of birds and their flocks through sky, hidden by the quickness of the human eye.
Ever since Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering photography of animal locomotion in 01877 and 01878 (including the notorious “horse shot by pistol” frames from an era less concerned with animal experiments), the trend has been to unpack our lived experience of movement into serial, successive frames. The movie camera smears one pace layer out across another, lets the eye scrub over one small moment.
In contrast, time-lapse and long exposure camerawork implodes the arc of moments, an integral calculus that gathers the entire gesture. Cooper’s flock photography is less the autopsy of high-speed video and more the graceful enzo drawn by a zen master.
Learn More
- Watch this clip from Jonathon Keats’ Long Now talk about a camera that takes a century to create a photograph.
- In 02017, geneticist George Church stored Muybridge’s famous “Sallie Gardner at a Gallop” in living bacteria.
