Birds as Existential Photography

Birds as existential photography represent more than aesthetic fascination; they embody a philosophical stance toward life and art.

Grey Heron Portrait : Milnerton Lagoon, Cape Town

"The heron waits, not for flight, but for meaning…" - Vernon Chalmers

Abstract

"Birds have long served as both subjects and symbols in art and literature, representing freedom, transcendence, and fragility. Within photography, birds become especially potent existential motifs — embodying the tension between being and non-being, movement and stillness, nature and human consciousness. This paper examines how avian photography operates as an existential medium, exploring how photographers engage with themes of temporality, perception, and the self through encounters with birds. Drawing from existential philosophy (Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) and contemporary photographic theory (Barthes, Sontag, Berger), the essay situates bird photography as a mode of being-in-the-world that reflects the photographer’s confrontation with finitude, solitude, and meaning. The essay also considers specific photographers, such as Vernon Chalmers and Jim Brandenburg, whose work embodies existential awareness through patient observation and immersion in avian life. Ultimately, “birds as existential photography” represents a fusion of ontology and vision — a recognition that in capturing the flight of a bird, the photographer simultaneously captures a moment of self-awareness and transience.

1. Introduction: The Ontological Significance of Birds

Birds occupy a privileged position in human imagination. Across cultures, they are emblems of spirit, flight, and the liminal threshold between earth and sky. In photography, this symbolism extends into existential reflection. The image of a bird — poised mid-flight or still in repose — invites the photographer and viewer into a confrontation with temporality and being. As Roland Barthes (1981) writes in Camera Lucida, every photograph “certifies that a thing has been” (p. 85), yet the bird’s transience underscores that this “having been” is always already gone. Bird photography therefore enacts a paradox: it attempts to hold still that which is most emblematic of freedom and impermanence.

Existential photography can be defined as an aesthetic practice that visualizes questions of being, selfhood, and temporality through the act of photographic seeing (Cotton, 2014). When the subject is a bird — inherently elusive, delicate, and temporal — the photographer’s pursuit becomes a metaphor for the existential search itself: the desire to grasp meaning within fleeting experience. As Sartre (1943/2003) proposed, consciousness is “a nothingness that makes being possible” (p. 21), perpetually reaching beyond itself. The camera, in this sense, becomes the technological extension of that consciousness.

2. Birds, Phenomenology, and Perception

The existential dimension of bird photography begins with perception. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945/2012) argued that perception is not passive reception but embodied engagement — “to perceive is to render oneself present to the world” (p. 67). Bird photographers enact this presence through patience, silence, and attunement to movement. They often wait for hours in concealed stillness, not merely observing but entering a shared temporal rhythm with their subjects.

In Vernon Chalmers’ bird photography, for instance, the act of seeing becomes a meditative state — an existential attentiveness that transforms perception into presence. His close studies of herons, egrets, and gulls around Woodbridge Island are less about technical perfection than about what he calls “being-with the bird” — a mode of coexistence rather than control (Chalmers, 2021). Such an approach resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s notion that vision is always reciprocal: “the seer and the visible reciprocate” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 139). The bird, in this exchange, is not object but interlocutor, a being who reveals the photographer’s own existential finitude.

This phenomenological intimacy transforms photography into what philosopher David Levin (1993) called a “pathway of perception” — a means of rediscovering the world through ethical seeing. Bird photography, then, is less documentation and more ontological dialogue.

3. Temporality, Flight, and the Moment

Flight — the quintessential avian gesture — is inherently existential. It represents transcendence, motion, and the passage of time. Capturing a bird in flight requires an acute awareness of temporality: the photographer must anticipate the instant that collapses becoming into being. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952) described this as the decisive moment, yet in existential terms, it is more than compositional timing. It is the intersection of existence and perception — the fleeting instant in which being discloses itself.

For Heidegger (1927/1962), existence (Dasein) is defined by temporality: we are beings thrown into time, aware of our finitude. Bird photography becomes a meditation on this thrownness. Every frame acknowledges the impossibility of permanence. The bird departs; the sky empties; the image remains only as trace. The photograph thus becomes, in Barthes’s (1981) sense, a “memento mori” — an emblem of death within life.

Jim Brandenburg’s series Chased by the Light (1998) exemplifies this temporal consciousness. Limiting himself to one exposure per day for 90 days in the Minnesota wilderness, Brandenburg sought to restore authenticity and presence to his practice. His images of loons, eagles, and ravens are suffused with stillness — not the stillness of technical capture, but of existential awareness. They evoke what Susan Sontag (1977) called “the melancholy of the photograph” (p. 71): the awareness that every image is an elegy for the moment it depicts.

4. The Ethics of Attention: Being-with Birds

To photograph a bird is to acknowledge alterity — the radical otherness of another living being. In existential terms, this recognition of the “Other” grounds ethical awareness. Emmanuel Levinas (1969) argued that ethical relation begins in the face-to-face encounter, where the other’s presence demands responsibility. Although birds lack a human “face,” the photographer’s encounter with their gaze, movement, or silence can still evoke this responsibility.

Bird photographers like Chalmers or Brandenburg emphasize minimal interference and respect for the subject’s autonomy. Such practice contrasts with exploitative wildlife imagery that objectifies animals as trophies of human skill. The existential photographer instead practices what John Berger (1980) described as “ways of seeing” that restore the subject’s dignity and mystery. Berger lamented the alienation between humans and animals in modernity, noting that animals were once “messengers and promises” (p. 5) but have become mere symbols. Existential bird photography reverses this alienation by cultivating genuine encounter.

This ethics of attention extends beyond representation. It acknowledges that the act of photographing a bird is also an act of humility — a recognition that meaning emerges not from domination but from coexistence. The bird, in its indifference to human presence, reflects the existential truth of our own contingency.

5. The Photographic Self: Freedom and Finitude

Existential photography is ultimately reflexive: to photograph is to confront oneself. Sartre (1943/2003) described existence as the tension between facticity (the given conditions of one’s being) and transcendence (the capacity to project oneself beyond them). Bird photography dramatizes this tension. The photographer’s facticity lies in groundedness — the human body, the camera, the limits of perception — while the bird embodies transcendence through flight.

This dynamic makes bird photography an allegory of human freedom. The desire to photograph flight mirrors the desire to be free from the constraints of mortality. Yet every photograph also reminds us of finitude: the image fixes motion into stillness, transforming life into representation. Heidegger (1927/1962) described this awareness as being-toward-death — the condition that gives meaning to existence. In photographing birds, the existential photographer acknowledges this finitude not through despair but through presence. The act of seeing becomes a form of being.

Vernon Chalmers’ writing on “existential photographic practice” (2021) emphasizes this interplay between freedom and limitation. He describes the camera as “a companion of being” that translates perception into reflection — a process in which “the photograph is not an end, but an echo of presence.” His images of solitary seabirds against vast skies evoke both isolation and belonging, freedom and fragility — core existential tensions.

6. Space, Silence, and the Sublime

Existential photography thrives in the spaces between presence and absence. Bird photographers often work in liminal environments — dawn marshes, coastal estuaries, open skies — where sound and silence converge. These spaces heighten awareness of being, evoking what Kant (1790/2000) termed the sublime: the confrontation with vastness that overwhelms human measure.

In the existential sense, the sublime is not merely aesthetic but ontological — a reminder of the smallness of the self within being. The solitary bird in a wide expanse of sky becomes a visual metaphor for human existence within the universe: fragile, transient, yet luminous. As Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) writes, the world reveals itself “in the spacing of presence” (p. 37). The photograph, too, exists in this spacing — the gap between seeing and being seen.

Bird photography’s silence also carries existential resonance. Where human subjects invite narrative and identity, birds resist language. Their being is pure immediacy. This silent alterity draws the photographer into what Rilke (1923/1984) called “the openness of being” — an encounter with existence before it is named.

7. Existential Method: Patience and Presence

Bird photography, unlike studio or street work, demands patience — often hours or days of waiting without certainty of outcome. This patience is not merely technical but philosophical. It enacts what Heidegger (1959/1971) called Gelassenheit, or “releasement”: a letting-be of beings as they are. The existential photographer relinquishes control, accepting contingency as condition of encounter.

Jim Brandenburg describes this as “being present enough to be chosen by the moment” (Brandenburg, 1998, p. 12). Similarly, Vernon Chalmers writes of the “existential patience” required to photograph birds in flight — a state of still awareness where anticipation and surrender coexist. This process recalls Simone de Beauvoir’s (1947/2004) notion of freedom as situated action: meaning emerges not from mastery but engagement.

In this way, the existential photographer resembles the phenomenologist: both suspend habitual thought to encounter the world anew. Bird photography thus becomes a discipline of presence — a practice through which the self learns to dwell within uncertainty and impermanence.

8. The Existential Image: From Representation to Relation

Most photography aspires to representation — to show what was seen. Existential photography, however, transforms representation into relation. The image of a bird is not a static record but a trace of encounter, a testimony to the photographer’s being-in-the-world. As philosopher Vilém Flusser (1983/2000) noted, photography can either reproduce the world’s surface or reveal its depth, depending on the intentionality behind the image.

When existential intention guides the lens, the resulting photograph becomes relational rather than illustrative. It does not assert mastery over the bird but reveals shared temporality. The viewer, encountering such an image, experiences what Barthes (1981) termed the punctum: that sudden, affective recognition that pierces consciousness. In bird photography, the punctum often lies in the delicate alignment of motion, light, and stillness — the existential moment that refuses full explanation.

Existential images, then, are not about the bird per se, but about being-with: they visualize the human condition through avian presence. The photograph becomes a space of co-existence where subject and object, seer and seen, dissolve into shared being.

9. Contemporary Existential Bird Photography

In contemporary practice, existential bird photography bridges art, ecology, and philosophy. Photographers such as Vernon Chalmers (South Africa), Jim Brandenburg (United States), and Andrew Fusek Peters (United Kingdom) merge aesthetic form with ontological reflection. Their works share characteristics: solitude, patience, ethical seeing, and an emphasis on presence over spectacle.

Digital technology adds new dimensions to this existential inquiry. The instantaneity of digital capture paradoxically intensifies awareness of time’s passage; high-speed photography exposes what the naked eye misses, revealing flight as a series of micro-existences. Yet existential meaning persists only through intentional slowness — through resisting the technological impulse toward accumulation. Chalmers (2023) describes his workflow as “slowing down perception in a world of instant seeing,” aligning with Byung-Chul Han’s (2015) critique of modern acceleration and the loss of contemplative temporality.

Thus, the existential bird photographer is both modern and ancient: using advanced optics to pursue timeless questions about perception, mortality, and being.

10. Conclusion: Birds, Being, and the Image

Birds as existential photography represent more than aesthetic fascination; they embody a philosophical stance toward life and art. In their flight, photographers perceive the essence of temporality; in their stillness, the presence of being. Each photograph becomes an act of reflection — a moment in which the photographer’s awareness of existence converges with the bird’s ephemeral presence.

Existential photography, at its core, is an ethics of presence: to see without possessing, to witness without domination, to acknowledge being through attentive seeing. Birds, as subjects, offer an unparalleled mirror for this inquiry because they symbolize what humanity both desires and fears — freedom, transience, and the inevitability of departure.

As Vernon Chalmers (2021) writes, “Every bird in flight is a question of being — and every photograph, an answer we must learn to live with.” In capturing birds, the photographer does not conquer nature but participates in it, discovering that the meaning of existence lies not in the permanence of the image but in the fleeting, luminous act of seeing." (Source: ChatGPT 2025)

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Image: Copyright Vernon Chalmers Photography