Flocking starlings are one of nature’s visual wonders, and lately, I’ve seen four artists who make work about the pesky birds. In substance, there’s no real difference between the four starling-art examples, each depicts starlings flocking as they prepare to nest for the evening.

Photographer Massimo Cristaldi photographed starlings in a dramatic location where they can be interpreted as smoke billowing from a refinery.

© Massimo Cristaldi

Mixed-media artist Laurent Grasso has an 8-minute video of starlings. Interestingly (and more substantively) he’s created a body of work called “studies into the past” where he paints scenes straight out of an art history textbook with extra, non-traditional elements, like an influx of starlings from his video.

© Laurent Grasso

“One of his most well known works, Les Oiseaux, depicts a flock of starlings filmed in the dusk sky above Rome. Taken out of its natural context, the flock of birds resembles an ionic particle field, moved as if by unseen magnetic waves.”

More traditionally, photographer Richard Barnes’ series “Murmur” shows starlings flocking in stills of black-and-white.

© Richard Barnes

Multimedia artist Suki Chan likes starlings, too. She made a “single-screen & multi-screen High Definition video” of starlings flocking, and stills from the film are available as well. Suki’s work was featured on the BBC, in the art-competition reality show “School of Saatchi”.

Below, reality show judge and messy-bed artist Tracy Enim asks Suki if the starlings are bats, while curator Kate Bush asks what the difference is between Suki’s piece and “a nature documentary”.

Each of these examples offer clearly rendered depictions of starlings in flight. HD in one case (and probably two: Grasso’s) and two photographers who are using great cameras to capture clear, descriptive images.

Yet, when you dive into the deep-end of video sites to watch starlings, examples run the gamut from well-produced nature documentaries, to exploratory first-person monologues beneath starlings, to pure low-fi amazement.

My question is, how do starlings, as a fine art subject, differ from the kids/puppies/rainbows of the amateur-photography set? They’re readymade for audience response, right? The artist/photographer is just delivering nature to the screen, book, or gallery wall (and maybe with a dash of ethereal audio for a soundtrack).

Beyond waterfalls, stalactites, and phospherescent fish, what other natural subjects quickly offer themselves for metaphorical renderings by contemporary artists? If you were to make pictures of flocking starlings for exhibition and sale, would you think you were the first photographer to exhibit photographs of starlings? Does being the first to make work of a particular subject matter? These days, is it more important if you’re the most recent?

This is the first starlings video I saw, years ago — and interstitial titles aside, it still wows me with its pixellated glory. Perhaps the trick is to capture something truly extraordinary and not call it art, eh?

Either Mr. Richardson has a bevy of able assistants who can develop, scan, and post a photo from a date-stamped roll of film in less than a day, or Mr. Richardson is watermarking a digital date-stamp onto the lower-right corner of his pictures for a decidedly analog, snapshot touch.

You be the judge?

Joel Sternfeld – Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington, June 1979
(from American Prospects)
n: 1979, p: 2003

The photograph is part of the permanent collection at the High Museum in Atlanta, and there’s a current show up called “Look Again“, curated by Asst. Curator of Photography Danielle Avram, that assesses marvels of the photo collection that may not have been viewed in awhile (See: Sommer).

I was talking to Danielle about the show, and Sternfeld’s picture, and she said a museum-goer sent her a link to a newspaper article about the elephant. Here’s the full story of what has happening on a country road in Woodland, Washington on June 27th, 1979.

Register-Guard – Eugene, OR, June 28th, 1979

The story’s pretty tragic, and there’s one paragraph that specifically deals with the circumstances of the photograph:

“A second elephant, Thai, escaped from the farm and refused to return, attracting more than 100 spectators and tying up traffic on a nearby road. The animal was coaxed onto a borrowed flatbed truck and returned to the farm late Wednesday.”

While Morgan Berry, the elephant’s trainer, was killed that day (by a different elephant, in the throes of Musth) his Animal Farm apparently kept operating for awhile. In true internet fashion, one fact led to another, and Berry’s farm is shown to have sold “Thai” to the Houston zoo in 1980, less than a year after the picture was taken. Thanks, elephant database!

Thai’s now the main bull Asian elephant in Houston, and is 43 years old. He’s come a long way from the wilds of Thailand, and along the way, he’s sired 14 elephants, most recently Mac, all of whom have died at relatively young ages. It must say something about the difficulty of raising Asian elephants in captivity, I suppose.

Thai’s even on flickr now. Is Mr. Sternfeld?

(Flickr photos via the Houston Zoo.)

In looking at these pictures, I was struck by their strength as photographs, not just as politically-charged documents, but as pictures with their own aesthetic power. They’re digital WANTED posters, essentially, and I’ve never seen anything like them. The foregrounds, the backgrounds, the croppings, the candidness of the subjects, the intention of the unknown photographer(s), the ominous red halos (or targets), the use of the images – everything about them is compelling, captivating, subject to discussion, and unknowable.

The Iranian gov’t site is currently down, but I was able to grab all 77 of the images. They’re available here as a zip file: Wanted.zip, or in this set Wanted in Iran on flickr.

I’d be interested to see if there’s some kind of creative remixing that might occur with these. Their provenance is as mysterious as their subject. Might the photographs have been made by Mousavi supporters, posted to pro-Mousavi sites, and then downoloaded and photoshopped by the regime? Or would the regime have their own cadre of photographers out photographing protestors (a common sight in San Francisco, New York, or London) to create evidence that might enable prosecutions down the line?

While their intended use is painfully clear, as digital photographs, there’s a unique and troubling power in their aggregate. Let us know what you think below, and if you have great ideas for their repurposing, please share what you’ve done.

Why? Exactly. And why not?

The video is in HD, if you need a closer look at the tutorial. There are lots of example videos out there. Have a look, and let us know in the comments if you’ve given mobile-phone time-lapsing a whirl.