John James Audubon painted his birds in watercolor in the wilds of North America in the 1820s and 30s. His paintings were reproduced as hand-colored intaglio prints by Robert Havell, London, and published as Birds of America, offered to subscribers in monthly five-print sets between 1827 and 1838. My photographs of corporate and civic architecture were made with 35mm film 170 years later. Audubon’s images and my negatives were scanned separately and combined.

Audubon was a heroic figure of my childhood for the quality of his art and the imagination and scale of his enterprise. In recent years I’ve come to appreciate his idealized yet convincing pictures as foreshadowing the visual revolution that followed Daguerre’s and Talbot’s 1839–1840 announcements of the invention of photography and its subsequent application to natural subjects.
Click the pictures to see larger versions:

Snowy Owl, Milano Hotel From the Steps
of the Old Mint, San Francisco, CA 1998

 Passenger Pigeon
Federal Building, Oakland, CA, 1997		 Black-throated Mango
Union Planters Bank, Milmi FL, 1999
Rough-legged Hawk
Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA, 2000

 Cooper's Hawk and Bluebird
Intel, Santa Clara, CA, 2001

Bohemian Chatterer, Sculpture Garden
Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY 2001

Ahinga
Times Square, New York, NY 2001		 Turkey Vulture, New York-New York
Casino, Las Vegas, NV, 1998		 Gyrfalcon, East River from Windows on
the World, WTC, New York, NY, 2000
Auduboniana was published by Landweber/Artists, Berkeley, California, 2015, in an edition of 15 and 5 artist’s proofs. Digital-pigment prints were made using HP Vivera inks on 14"×20" Legion Moab Entrada paper.

A boxed set of edition numbers 1–10 is available as a portfolio of the complete set of nine prints, presented in a custom-made solander case with cover sheet and colophon: