Lukas Felzmann

Swarm

Swarm is a breathtaking photographic series exploring the flock movements of migrating birds. The photographs offer a unique view of the beauty but also the complexity and diversity of shape variations. A swarm sitting on the ground mirrors the surface of the earth like a skin, but as soon as it lifts up it becomes a fluid three-dimensional system in constant flux. This aerial ballet reveals a rhythm of upward explosion and downward, cascading movement. At times the forms seem to explode, blooming like flowers or expanding outward like fireworks. At other times they appear more stable, slowly drifting like a negative image of stellar constellations. Swarm looks up into the sky and follows flight through the dynamic landscape of streams of air.

Swarm is a breathtaking photographic series exploring the flock movements of migrating birds. The photographs offer a unique view of the beauty but also the complexity and diversity of shape variations. A swarm sitting on the ground mirrors the surface of the earth like a skin, but as soon as it lifts up it becomes a fluid three-dimensional system in constant flux. This aerial ballet reveals a rhythm of upward explosion and downward, cascading movement. At times the forms seem to explode, blooming like flowers or expanding outward like fireworks. At other times they appear more stable, slowly drifting like a negative image of stellar constellations. Swarm looks up into the sky and follows flight through the dynamic landscape of streams of air.

PhotoEspaña 2012: Best Photography Book of the Year

Author(s): Lukas Felzmann

With photographs by Lukas Felzmann

With contributions by Peter Pfrunder, Gordon H. Orians, Deborah M. Gordon and Wallace Stevens

Design: Lukas Felzmann with Integral Lars Müller

21 x 27 cm, 8 ¼ x 10 ½ in

240 pages, 115 illustrations

hardback

2011, 978-3-03778-241-5, English
CHF 55.00

Lukas Felzmann

Lukas Felzmann (*1959) is an artist and educator. He was born and grew up in Zürich, Switzerland, and has been living and working in San Francisco since 1981 where he tought photography at the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University for two decades. He is now an affiliated scholar at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. Felzmann's work and installations contain sculptural elements, and through photographic means he explores the intersections of the natural and the cultural.