Painting pathways
in the sky

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? An impending storm? Or an alien invasion? All these questions come to mind when looking at Xavi Bou’s intriguing photos. And it is hard to look away. Even when we learn that the shapes in the sky are in fact birds, the Barcelona-based photographer keeps us guessing. These are clearly not typical bird portraits, so what are they?

“I don’t want to show birds in flight. I want to show flight,” Bou says about his Ornithographies series. To achieve this, he makes multiple slow-motion recordings with a digital film camera and stitches them together in post-production. The images overlap, revealing the hidden beauty of flight even as the birds themselves become almost indistinguishable. 

“My work is about showing nature in a different way,” he explains. In fact, he likes to say that he is not inspired by nature. Rather, nature does what it always does. He is simply the curator who selects the bird species to observe and combines art and technology to reveal their specific behaviors and choreographies.

Becoming a parent around the same time Ornithographies started, almost a decade ago, unexpectedly benefitted the project, he says. “I had to face the reality that if I wanted to be a present father, I needed to find birds close to my home. Most of the different types of flights are represented here [Catalonia], so I have no need to travel a lot. It’s also a way to value the common birds that we have around cities. Most of the project is common birds – starlings, seagulls, swifts – and I’m proud about that.”

By making the invisible visible, Bou hopes that his images spark curiosity about the nature we often overlook and encourage us to look up at the sky once in a while. “We are really disconnected [from nature]. To protect something you need to love it, and to love it, you need to know it exists.”