Avian Histories of Photography

In the first half-century of photographic history, various species of birds were implicated in the development and deployment of the new medium. Over the decades, birds became producers of industrial materials, subjects of photographic imagery, and, in special cases, disseminators and destroyers of photographic information. The invention of the albumen print and other albumen-based photographic processes created immense demand for egg white, which put fatal pressure on avian populations as a new industry sought materials for industrial consumption. Several species of albatross neared extinction over the course of the nineteenth century, with the collection of their eggs for albumen among the primary reasons for their precarity. By 1870, albumen became part of the experimental microphotography of René Dagron, who was called upon during the Franco-Prussian War to employ his processes to condense vast amounts of official and personal correspondence for dissemination over enemy lines. This material was smuggled into the besieged city of Paris by homing pigeons, with rolled films attached to their legs that could be collected, copied, and distributed by leagues of functionaries. This opened an aerial front to the siege in which unsuspecting pigeons were targeted by Prussian hawks, becoming bloodied proxies of an informational battle between human factions. Amidst a methodological turn to chemical and material histories of photography, this presentation centers bird species including the chicken, albatross, pigeon, and hawk as agents with avian histories of photography, enmeshed in and sometimes disrupting networks of invention and exploitation.