Gorgeous Photos Highlight Beautiful Intricacies of Birds' Feathers

As we've admired many times before, birds are wondrous, beautiful creatures. And in this series titled Birds, fashion photographer Thomas Lohr shows off their gorgeous plumage. He focuses on tightly-cropped, up-close shots of feathers, and he captures a variety of colors, textures, and movements within the illustrious tufts. It's an unusual way to look at birds, and one that blurs the line between documentation and fine art.

In some of Lohr's photographs, it's even unclear that we're looking at a bird. His vantage point abstracts the feathers and they seem to resemble scales or long strands of fur. Other times, the delicate layers of quills and vanes unmistakingly belong to a bird. “My aim was to show the variety of the species and the array of plumage, so I shot a wide range instead of concentrating on particular birds,” he tells AnOther.

Lohr did some traveling for this series, and it's now a book of the same name. He only wanted to capture portraits of living birds, so he visited different parks and menageries all over Europe. The results are photos that highlight the vast elegance of these enigmatic animals.

Thomas Lohr website
via [This Isn't Happiness and AnOther]

Sara Barnes

Sara Barnes is a Staff Editor at My Modern Met, Manager of My Modern Met Store, and co-host of the My Modern Met Top Artist Podcast. As an illustrator and writer living in Seattle, she chronicles illustration, embroidery, and beyond through her blog Brown Paper Bag and Instagram @brwnpaperbag. She wrote a book about embroidery artist Sarah K. Benning titled 'Embroidered Life' that was published by Chronicle Books in 2019. Sara is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned her BFA in Illustration in 2008 and MFA in Illustration Practice in 2013.
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