A childhood encounter with a crow at a zoo led to a lifetime fascination with avian life for the American artist Jim Dine. This encounter with the bird was perceived by the young Dine with a mixture of fear, fascination and a deeper understanding of his unconscious world, and from it grew a mythic personal symbolism, which he explores in
Birds
, a series of remarkable black-and-white photographs. Here, an everyday, unspectacular bird might appear to the beholder as a character of mythology, as a jester at a Medieval court, or as a strange messenger from a world behind the scenes. These are rich, intimate, darkly detailed images imbued with symbolism and meaning. They are also beautiful and compelling, particularly as published in this spectacular volume, which, with 36 images printed using a technique called heliogravure, and with a Japanese binding, is a truly beautiful object in itself, and reveals a new aspect of Dine's work.