For more than thirty years, Jean Luc Mylayne has been photographing the birds of his native France and the American West. The creation of each image is a laborious process which can take months as Mylayne returns to the same location, day after day. Mylayne asserts that the birds, he particularly focuses on bluebirds, are willing actors in the making of the picture.

Equipped with a Hasselblad medium format and a Sinar view camera, he and his partner spend weeks and months exposing themselves to the natural environment of the animals and establishing a relationship that does not involve feeding or taming them. This process can sometimes take up to a year. The artists take great care in preparing for the moment décisif—the point at which the birds have become accustomed to the presence of human being, camera, tripod, flash and photographic equipment and, like actors, finally take their place in an envisaged motif. This scrupulous approach is also reflected in the titles of the photographs, which are numbered chronologically. The images are a stark departure from the conventions of documentary nature photography, and not just on account of their unusually long gestation period. The visual space of the works is emphatically non-hierarchical. The birds are rarely at the center of a composition; a viewer’s eye might first have to wander over the image to make them out. Virtuosic modulations of light and shadow reveal the flora of their habitat, seasons and times of day, the position of the sun and plays of clouds in the sky. The depicted landscapes sometimes show such ordinary traces of civilization as fences, power lines, farm equipment, various buildings, a boat or even a pair of red cowboy boots.
Mylayne deploys all the tools analogue imaging technology has to offer. Many of his complex tableaux use custom-made, hand-ground lenses in various combinations for a multifocal dynamic of sharpness and blurriness—a unique, specifically sculptural shaping of light with sometimes painterly effects. None of the images are digitally manipulated. The specific scale of the often large-format prints depends on the physical dimensions of the birds shown: The animals generally do not appear larger in the work than they do in the setting where they were photographed.
The subtle richness of detail, multilayered composition and almost mystically captured temporality of Mylaynes’s works defy traditional readings of the photographic. He consistently transforms the idyllic nature of conventional landscape depictions and reveals the beauty and sauvage element in nature beyond clichéd pictorial strategies. His idiosyncratic works challenge viewers to see in an associative way, offering a wide range of perceptive possibilities and endless new details to discover. The birds they capture become both symbol and symptom of a gaze that quietly puts man’s anthropocentric view of the world in its place.


"When I see a bird, I see at the same time that bird on a tree near the house. I see everything as an ensemble, and I realize that's how I see everything in life." — Jean Luc Mylayne