Confessions of a Birdwatcher

Spending time and time spent. You can spend a lot of time or a little, and you get what you pay for. Imagine, then, something very simple; a kind of bucolic inventory - birds and horses, sheep and cows; fields, prairie or marshland; an old farm; a lazy river; some trees; a lake; the wind and flowers; rain or snow and a clearing in the sky. Imagine also a man (and his companion) engaged in a perpetual traverse through villages and surrounding countryside. A quiet walk down to a lonely place, not far from a bergerie; a day spent in observation, recollection and preparation. And then on again. A restless criss-crossing, place to place, making checks at every station.

From this context Jean-Luc Mylayne plucks a few moments, the punctuation of his movements, and photographs them. He subtracts or diminishes large parts of the inventory, subsuming, in the play of focus or the blur of movement against too slow a shutter, all individualising detail, all flora and most fauna. All gone, until what is left as so-called subject can be succinctly summed up: birds. Mylayne's own biography is composed of lines of flight and their temporary destinations. He migrates, living a nomad's existence, 'befriends' birds - alone or in groups - spends considerable time among them, photographing them in situ, and exhibits the resulting photographs. The dimensions of his works are the length, width, height and time of his devotion. What he shows, part fiction and part documentary, is possessed of such a lucidity and generosity of regard that it spins an almost vernacular pictorial language into something like a truth. Truth told, but in a whisper.

All thoughts of Mylayne striving for a definitive rendering of something particular about his subject should be discarded. The moments captured are not decisive. They aren't even decided. Yet, his is a complete fidelity: to the birds and to the results of his patient occupation of their spaces. In marked contrast to most photographic portraiture, one does not have the sense that something has been stolen from these subjects. Perhaps it is to avoid soul-stealing that Mylayne steers clear of the human subject. Reverence, exploitation and spectacle can, and do, co-exist (even, and often, in pictures of animals), but there is scant spectacle in his images. Mylayne often gets his lens very close to his birds, close enough to eat them. But such is the strength of his alchemy that the hunger of his attention is a gentle one. What passes after his camera's consumption declines the option of transformation and chooses transposition instead; or, accepting and exploiting the death inherent in any photographic project, opts for transmigration. The remains (the photograph) of the encounter are notation or evidence: a meeting of time, space and subject having everything and nothing to do with the depicted birds; being 'about' them - but only in passing - and moving out towards a chance at the infinite. And if all of this sounds vague then that is as it should be. Partly because of, but also in spite of, its surface 'realness', Mylayne's art is a mystic one - he trafficks in spiritual magic on an earthly plane.

The images' staggering beauty hits you at a glance: a curious and potent mingling of veracity and falseness. One is not given to doubt that the photographer was there, or that the scene looked like that. His concern is not with a questioning of photography's hold on the real. His renderings, in their fullness, in their vivid colours, in their faithfulness, flirt (if only quirkily) with a formalism, or a pretense toward the documentary. But admission to those schools is denied by each work's visual convulsions. Mylayne's eye admits of all kinds of ephemera and is unafraid of visual indecipherability. At times the birds are fogged in a branch tangle, scrubbed over by brush, or captured in the plane of softest focus. At times they wander painfully close to the frame's edge and threaten to disappear, or recede so far into the picture's depth that we lose track of them. The tilt, swing, rise and fall of his camera are put into play as devices for the muddying of clarity; instead of employing them to achieve verisimilitude, he deliberately damages perspective and focus. It seems he wishes us to see the underpinnings of his presentation. He happily provides the beauty - the dapple of the sun, the bird in flight - but also employs a subtle illegibility: a 'dirtiness' of the image, deliberately sabotaging it in an effort to foreground its conceptual structure.

It is a backhanded tribute to say that his sabotage partially fails - the sublime snakes through anyway and sometimes threatens to overwhelm. Maybe Mylayne knew it would; perhaps he's counting on our being overtaken by their full resonance only after we've stared at the pictures so long. They carry within them a contradiction that flowers in the irreconcilable and inscrutable polar play of subjectivity/objectivity. They have characteristics of both live video (the window-like, direct presentation of place) and still photography (re-presentation of a past moment), but they manage to usurp the limitations of each. In the photographs there is a 'this is how it is' cohabiting with a 'this is how it was', and the resulting resonance generates visual electricity. That Mylayne sees this way, and is able to demonstrate this seeing, is due in no small part to what could be called the monastic aspect of his approach: solitariness and rigour, quietness and diligence, and a working process piloted by an abiding belief. The religious aspect of his methodology is both his most potent tool and his work's most subtle component. (When I say 'religious', I am redefining it rather broadly and secularly - Mylayne's is a religion of one.) His concentrated and singularly sustained dedication to the investigation of a particular belief as concept, as song of life, embodies a piety of living, a probity of regard and a passionate interest in the implementation of a single structure for understanding how we, as humans, are in the world. And how it is with us.

If a photographer only ever takes pictures of her or himself, then these photographs reveal the artist as bird, living a bird's life. The chances are good that we'll never 'know' him, and it wouldn't matter if we did. In an unpublished manuscript, Mylayne cryptically writes of humankind's special relationship with time, and how that relationship leads to 'isolation in a condition of paradoxical ambiguity'. Stranded in the prisons we call bodies, it happens that we can see ourselves silhouetted against the vastness of history and the future; giving up or striving, or both, at different times. This qualitative experience of time can induce a doubled isolation - in the body and in the world. And that can make you cry. But in the sough of the wind in a photograph you just might find a miracle that will make it all right; and that would be cool.