Book review: Ornithographies by Xavi Bou 

The word ornithology comes from the Greek for ‘bird’ ornis and the Greek for ‘word’ or ‘discourse’ logos so ‘a discourse on birds’ or in more modern usage ‘bird science’. Ornithographies is a first book of bird photography by the Spanish-born Xavi Bou, although ‘bird photography’ does not do justice to his innovative technique for capturing birds in flight. Exploring the etymology of the neologism that is the title of his book, graphia is Greek for ‘writing’ – a very apt characterisation of the images with their breathtaking script-like renderings of flight patterns. 

Bou’s Ornithographies series of photos emerge from the tradition of chronophotography, pioneered by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, and he shares a similar desire with them to both visualise data points and also to give them aesthetic standing on their own. Where his predecessors foregrounded each individual image that makes up the motion, Bou emphasises the seamlessness of the motion itself and elides the sequential into a kind of timeless simultaneity. Each chapter title – “Waves”, “Strokes”, “Swirls”, etc – points at these grander time and space scales and underscores the connections to writing and drawing that Muybridge and Marey only hinted at when they abstracted their photos into drawings or sculptures. 

The images in the book are mostly stunning and all are completely unique – the energy in the orthographies vibrates on the page and in the eye. My favourite ones are found in the “Around the Rock” section of the book where there is a visual noise that mimics the cacophony of an island rookery. I was also partial to the images where it is difficult to find a “beginning” or “end” to the flight path and where there are so many individual birds that it is hard to distinguish one from the other. These images were the most reminiscent of calligraphy, and encouraged a kind of “reading”, but these cursive gestures are ultimately asemic with no semantic content. The book of nature from the Middle Ages remains unreadable in our era, despite Bou making us believe it is possible. 

On the contrary, orthographies where the flight motion has a clear beginning and end like the one that opens the book – “Orthography #034, Larus michahellis, Yellow-legged Gull” – are less appealing. The allusions for this reader tend toward the representational rather than the abstract, evoking UFOs or dragons (#106). Images where an orthography is juxtaposed to a still, real-life bird seem comic as in the orthography with a hawk (#040) or cormorants (#055) looking on.  

When they share space with people (or their vehicles) in the background it is hard not to imagine references to Hitchcock’s The Birds or some kind of super-bird Transformer that coalesces out of regular birds (#108). Many of these are his early orthographies, and Bou’s practice evolves over time. As the work progresses over the series, it becomes more abstract and the sky becomes a moody page on which the birds write (endlessly).  

Bou shares in an interview that the images are also inspiring conservation. Architects and others are taking inspiration from them and looking at applications to address the challenges humans are facing in this time of compounding threats from the climate and nature crises. Every reader will see the flights of birds in a new way because of Bou and want to ensure those flights for the future.  

> For an interview with Xavi Bou and more of his stunning images from Ornithographies, see BirdLife Magazine April-June 2021. 

Reviewed by E.J. McAdams

“The images in the book are mostly stunning and all are completely unique – the energy in the orthographies vibrates on the page and in the eye.” – E.J. McAdams