(The following essay is a written accompaniment to the body of work I created for my Mellon Fellowship project during the summer of 2020 – an experience that, unbeknownst to me, was laying the foundation for my Watson Fellowship).
“They really like you. It’s like they know you’re photographing them!”
I turned to see a young man stopped on his bike six feet away from me, commenting on the models that had captivated me for the past two hours: a flock of nearly four dozen pigeons taking over the park benches before me. They indulged my focus on them, bobbing their feathered heads and strutting side to side as if intentionally gracing me with their best angles. I had spent the better part of my afternoon following this flock relentlessly up and down a two-hundred-foot stretch of bench-lined paths in Manhattan’s Union Square Park, juggling two cameras plus an extra lens stuffed into the waistband of my shorts.
Over the past two months, I dedicated days like these to birds that city-dwellers often consider “rats with wings,” if they consider them at all. To many, pigeons are dirty, annoying, and poop too much. But to me, they are visually interesting and comically bold. They have piercing red eyes, an amazing range of expressions, and iridescent feathers. They are an undeniable part of New York City’s identity and culture. With roughly four million pigeons, the city’s human-to-pigeon ratio is 2:1. We are co-inhabitants of the city, and urban life is as much theirs as it is our own. We walk the same sidewalks, eat the same food, share the same parks, and yet, humans often fail to recognize how inextricably linked our existences are. Our infrastructure and the by-products of consumerism have not only sustained pigeons but enabled them to thrive, and yet we consider these birds abject and alien from ourselves.
My project aims to redefine pigeons in the public eye. Through a series of forty-five photographs, I illustrate the diversity, personality, and biology that makes these birds unique. Beyond simply challenging the common misperception of pigeons-as-pests, I grapple with beauty-dependent conceptions of value and the imagined division between “civilization” and “wilderness.”
***
The man on the bike introduced himself as Casey. Neither a photographer nor pigeon-lover—the two types of people I had otherwise interacted with during my shoot in New York—Casey was just a guy who had noticed me noticing the pigeons, curious as to what they looked like through my lens. “Can I take a look?” He stopped his bike to watch as I flicked through the recent photos in my camera roll, now filled with over a thousand photos of those chunky birds. “Wow!” He smiled upon seeing my images, waving a friend over to join. “You gotta come look at these!”
This reaction is exactly the goal of my work. When I explain to people that my summer fellowship has been to “de-stigmatize street pigeons through portraiture,” they laugh at first or nod curiously, as if trying to envision what the heck I could possibly be doing. “Wait, did you say, pigeons?” But I discovered that when I show them samples of my photographs, the work speaks for itself. My cousin Charlie’s response seemed to capture this feeling well: “That is NOT what I expected to see.” Where most “expect” pigeons to be the unwanted blemishes you photoshop out of a picture, I present their wholeness in my images.
This project involved a combination of onsite photography, in-person interviews, and thinking like a pigeon. The latter enabled me to find pigeons, locate their roosts, and, most importantly, develop a sensitivity to their moods, expressions, and interactions. For days throughout the summer, I tracked down and photographed pigeons—an activity I dubbed, “pigeoning”—in New Haven, Bridgeport, and New York City. During these photo shoots I observed and recorded pigeon behavior and flight patterns in a handwritten notebook I began to call my “pigeon journal.” My journal includes notes about my experience on the ground and also details my thought process, joys, frustrations, and things I learned along the way. Ultimately, I studied the pigeon as both bird and concept not only through my photographs, but through interviews with New York pigeon feeders that contributed to my own ever-expanding pigeon awakening.
***
I met Joy by chance in Manhattan’s Union Square Park, a woman in a big-beaded necklace and sandals who looked about forty. She leaned her scooter against a park bench and removed four medium bags of Trader Joe’s sunflower seeds from her purse, sprinkling some in a semi-circle around her feet. She fed the ensuing swarm of pigeons with expert calm as dozens began flocking to her lap, handlebars, and sensible bucket hat. “The lighter ones need food and the heavier ones don’t as much,” Joy told me. “I try to make sure everyone gets an equal amount, or at least enough.”
Joy had only been coming to feed the pigeons for about a week. She started out in a park uptown but quickly found that Union Square pigeons were much more docile. “They were really skittish [in the other park]. But here, they’ll eat from the palm of my hand.” Joy offered numerous facts about pigeon biology interspersed with such anecdotes. “They are so smart,” she told me, sharing that pigeons can recognize human expressions, spot food from hundreds of feet in the air, and that each has a distinct personality. “I remember individuals whenever I come. And they remember me.”
Others interacted with pigeons in different ways. Where Joy kept a straight face while feeding them systematically, another woman, Maria, cooed sweet words as she invited them to perch on her outstretched arm. One man did not feed the pigeons at all but sat absorbed in his phone, indifferent, as they perched across his arms and lap.
When I asked Joy why she had begun to feed these pigeons day after day, she told me it was the “hard times” this summer which drew her to the birds. “In light of recent struggles,” she said, referencing the Covid-19 pandemic, “so many people need food. And they need food, too.”
Joy was not the only person I talked to who considered pigeon-feeding an act of philanthropy. Maria, a 76-year-old woman who came to New York City from Romania thirty years ago, described feeding the pigeons as “like giving to a charity.” Formerly a nurse, she donated money to a hospital for years before realizing that it was, in her words, “a crux”—from her tone I infer she meant to say “a hoax”—which is precisely why she turned to giving to the pigeons. To her, they offered a more reliable and tangible outlet for service.
In reality, pigeons are far from “needy.” Formally called rock doves or rock pigeons, the birds’ wild nesting grounds are high, rocky cliffs and seeds their preferred diet, so the granite high-rises and discarded burger buns of our concrete jungles make for the perfect pigeon domain. They breed year-round with only one main predator, the peregrine falcon, so feral pigeon populations are at low risk of decline. If anything, feeding pigeons in large numbers puts them at a greater risk of extermination by irritated residents. As is the case with many animals, the anthropomorphic projections that lead people to feed pigeons prove more in service of the human conscience than the “needs” of the birds themselves.
But pigeon feeders do have a point; it is true that rock pigeons are an unappreciated quasi-natural feature of the urban landscape. The facts Joy had for me proved just the tip of the iceberg. Pigeons sport great diversity in plumage due to melanin-based coloration, making them everything from black, to white, to red, to speckled and everything in between. They also have special pigments in their eyes called pterins—the same pigment found in butterfly wings—which gives their irises incredible brilliance and tonal variation rarely found in other bird species. Much of my work emphasizes these astounding eyes. Another favorite fact about pigeons is that they are one of the most muscular birds and thus among the most powerful fliers. And after hanging out with the same group of pigeons for multiple hours, I have seen their individuality in action. Some were proud, others deferential, some lumbering and others determined.
People like Joy and Maria see pigeons as birds, not as pests. Their sensitivity illustrates the wonder that follows openness and attention to one’s surroundings—qualities I try to capture in my work. Where Joy was more fact-based in her way of appreciation, Maria said simply, “I love them. I just think they are so beautiful.”
***
Photographing pigeons over the course of this project changed the way I interact with urban areas. In Connecticut cities, where pigeons are much less frequent and more skittish than in New York City, my days shooting became like treasure hunts where each pigeon I found was a clue to unlock their local gathering places. I now point them out when walking around and scan for their nests when driving below previously unremarkable highway bridges. Seeing pigeons interact on windowsills drew my attention to buildings I otherwise may not have noticed; following them down alleyways led to a deeper exploration of places I have lived nearby my whole life.
Pigeon Visions is as much about the sociology of urban life as it is a documentary of fauna. At the top level, to recognize—and more so, to appreciate—pigeons is to move more positively through urban spaces. But the next step is to recognize that the widespread infamy of pigeons has little to do with the birds themselves.
The pigeon-as-pest mentality is a product of “othering.” When humans bulldozed natural spaces to build up cities, they carved out areas for people to escape the so-called untamed wilderness, replacing native organisms with landscape architecture and domesticated pets. This effort furthered the socio- spatial imagining of a boundary between “clean” civilization and “wild” nature. Pigeons threaten that distinction by inhabiting the spaces we partition for ourselves, bursting our bubble of imagined control. Every poop on our benches and flock underfoot confronts us with a basic fact we try so hard to forget; that we are just another animal in an ecosystem beyond our control.
The result of this reminder is scorn for something alive that remains wild, beings we did not choose to plant or buy from a breeder. Creatures that have thrived despite our destruction are not seen as miracles, but as annoyances. We value only the lives we decide are pleasing and pigeons are an emblem of this dynamic.
Often, both art and animals must be considered beautiful or cute to be deemed worthy. I struggled while creating these pigeon portraits, questioning to what extent my images depend on beauty to create meaning. Beauty and rarity should not be the basis upon which we assign value. One should not have to think pigeons are beautiful to respect their existence just as it should not take the threat of imminent extinction for us to protect animal habitats.
My goal is to trigger awareness and more inclusive ways of thinking about urban birds through sharing my process, thinking, and work. Ultimately, I believe that the power in these pictures lies in the spirit that inspired them—the authentic sensitivity of photographer to subject. I have represented pigeons in the way that I experience them, and it is powerful to share that feeling.