Jean Luc Mylayne

For more than thirty years, Jean Luc Mylayne has been photographing the birds of his native France. The creation of each images is a laborious process which can take months as Mylayne returns to the same location, day after day, waiting for his “actors,” the birds, to play their parts before his lense. Mylayne asserts that the birds–he particularly focuses on bluebirds indigenous to Western Europe and the Western United States–are willing participants in the making of the picture. This is Jean Luc Mylayne’s first book, and will accompany a U.S. exhibition traveling to the Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston; University of Seattle; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and University of Urbana-Champaign. The book features essays by Blaffer Gallery director Terrie Sultan, as well as Lynne Cooke.

“When I see a bird, I see at the same time that bird on a tree near the house. I see everything as an ensemble, and I realize that’s how I see everything in life. . . . With my lenses, I can take in that place, then the tree, the bush, the house. I try to capture all those places at the same moment, just like our eye travels from one spot to another in taking in the scene, and I try to reconstitute it.” –Jean Luc Mylayne, Marfa, Texas, 2006