they are a part of many city landscapes,
and they
have not gone unnoticed, photographer and native New Yorker Andrew Garn has
spent years documenting these creaturing and collecting them into a book
titled The New York Pigeon: Behind the
Feathers,
to
share their “personalities, expressiveness, glorious feather iridescence, and
deeply hued eyes.” Birds that used to be exchanged between the wealthy as gifts
have grown to have different associations, and created a whole industry of
pigeon defense systems for urban architecture,
the
goal of Garn’s work is, in part, to cast them in a different light (both
literally and otherwise), showing the elegance of these creatures when taken out
of everyday contexts where some find them to be annoying pests, some shots put
subjects against dark backgrounds, focusing the viewer necessarily on the birds
themselves,
others
put them in their urban contexts, highlighting them in flight or perched on
windows,
an
oft overlooked wonder of the urban wilderness, the common pigeon is much more than it appears, strangely
enough we have featured pigeons more than a
few times before, including them on
stamps!
and I can never think of pigeons without thinking
of Tom Lehrer's
summertime song and
he is still going strong.
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