25 June 2026
I have just learned, (through the press release from Liam Halvorsen's 2024 show The Prepolitics at 100 Bell Towers in Montreal), about Dr. Julius Neubronner's invention of pigeon photography. The German apothecary apparently had a flock of pigeons, and in 1907 he filed a patent application for his pigeon camera, which he would put on a timer and strap to his birds so they could take photos (some of the earliest aerial photos ever) as they flew.
The images they produced are wonderful. Rooftops of homes and buildings, streets curling through cities, looming hillsides and lonely trees, people barely and unrecognizably pocking urban landscapes as blurred smudges. Always at strange angles, and often with parts of their wings flapping into frame like a finger slipping over a lens. Whimsical and arbitrary, but infused with a starkness both peaceful and sort of post-apocalyptic. Something very relieving about the dense and unbothered emptiness that is left once humans exit the eye.