A childhood encounter with a crow at a zoo led to a lifetime fascination with avian life for the American artist Jim Dine. This encounter with the bird was perceived by the young Dine with a mixture of fear, fascination and a deeper understanding of his unconscious world, and from it grew a mythic personal symbolism, which he explores in Birds, a series of remarkable black-and-white photographs. Here, an everyday, unspectacular bird might appear to the beholder as a character of mythology, as a jester at a Medieval court, or as a strange messenger from a world behind the scenes. These are rich, intimate, darkly detailed images imbued with symbolism and meaning. -- amazpmc
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