when you say my name I disappear is a series of twenty-six six-line stanzas, each incorporating the name of a bird (Auk to Ziz, alphabetically), and published as a handmade chapbook that is included in the original portfolio. Each poem mimics, typographically, a murmuration of form, and synthesizes the name of each bird, and its call (including any physical distillation of feather ruffling, eating, mating rituals, diving, hunting, nest building, etc.) into a sound poem reminiscent of these attributes. Respectively, each photograph in the series, captured at the point of listening, gives shape to those sonic attributes in an imagistic form. What is curious here, though, is that each bird is absent from view, having escaped the camera’s intended purpose. Here, listening supersedes observation. Hence, to corrupt Juliet Capulet’s own song, “my name shapes my world and my world shapes my name.” 

For these twenty-six photographs, I meditated on an age-old abstraction: does birdsong merely communicate a hierarchy of needs, or does it allude to an aesthetic relationship with and representation of its environment? Is it a passing melody, or an answer? Just as mating rituals attract the eye of the potential companion, I reflected on the nature of birdsong in relation to the shape and form of individual avifauna, how their bodies and outcries shape aesthetic perception, and human misperception (usually), and in the case of these series, the interpretation (photographically) of their clamor–even while absent from sight: the world in the shape of its name. 

In the case of when you say my name I disappear, the twenty-six images are descriptive “nets” of what I feel from having heard, but having not seen, each of these creatures in their natural habitats, reinvented as orthographies, dedicated to singularities of avian style (ornithology), which are interpreted (again) by a non-textual eye: the photograph. Hence, ornithographies. I, as author, seem to inhabit the space of a prism, wherein twenty-six birds are refracted into twenty-six images, each approximating the call’s “author.” My hope is not so much to speak for the birds, but to have acknowledged our relationship as an indiscrete creative organ and giver of mutual life, both aesthetical and biological: the mirror now reflects a disembodied music. Who is to say the sound of a name is not its world?

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