Monday, January 3, 2011

quails in winter


These are just a pair from the flock that descended today on the ground underneath our bird feeder, scratching around for seeds like barnyard fowl, but all bunched together in a speckled, feathered mass.   These two appear to have rather genteel mohicans.

I can't possibly make any easy transition from them to Diane Arbus's mid-1960s images, which are what I've been reading about - happily I've hit the moment when she didn't go anywhere without her flash, firing it off (and getting complaints) in people's faces on buses and in the street.   What I hadn't known was that not only did she become inspired by Weegee's style, but she actually on at least one occasion had travelled with him in his car, with its radio tuned to the police responder channel - and so that makes a great transition for my chapter on photography and exposure.   I think that she would (and with justification) have found a couple of quails remarkably sedate.

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