The photographer Christophe Maout invites us to rediscover the birds of the cities from the windows of his Parisian apartment while the country is in lockdown in 2020. He sets up a very particular device combining a pair of binoculars and a camera which takes us back to the origins of the medium. These round images evoke 19th century photography, that of the first Kodak cameras, but also its very essence: the optical image circle projected onto the sensitive surface. Varying the times of the day, the orientations of the sun and the species of birds, Christophe Maout reconnects with the ornithological tradition of observation, while adding an artistic gesture in the framing and the color. It thus transports us into a universe of lightness, alternating points of view, between skies and building roofs, with clouds and the horizon as the only visual cues.

This twelfth title in the collection is an ode to the magnificent freedom of birds that makes us look up to the sky. We had to wait to be locked up to learn how to look at them better.

This book is part of collection Des oiseaux (On birds) which celebrates, through the vision of different artists, their immense presence in a world where they are now vulnerable. Accompanying these photographs, the ornithologist Guilhem Lesaffre writes a special essay. Other titles in the collection include: Albarrán Cabrera, Graciela Iturbide, Leila Jeffreys, Rinko Kawauchi, Michael Kenna, Byung-Hun Min, Yoshinori Mizutani, Paolo Pellegrin, Bernard Plossu, Pentti Sammallahti and Terri Weifenbach.