Audubon’s Birds were originally painted in watercolor in the wilds of North America in the 1820s and 30s, then reproduced as hand-colored intaglio prints by Robert Havell, London, between 1827 and 1838. It occurred to me that by inserting Audubon’s images into photographs of recent corporate and civic architecture, I could create a potent juxtaposition of pre- and post-industrial American artifacts and spaces.

Although I’ve never been a birder, John James Audubon was a heroic figure of my childhood for the quality of his illustrations and the imagination and scale of his enterprise. In recent years I’ve come to an additional appreciation of his idealized, pre-photographic pictures of manipulated natural subjects as a foreshadow of the visual revolution that followed Daguerre’s and Talbot’s 1839–40 invention of photography.

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