Live clouds of thousands of birds in the Black Sun photo project

Soren Solker created a very unusual project at the intersection of photoanimalism and landscape photography, resulting in something much more fascinating. Hundreds and even thousands of birds in his pictures turn into amazing figures. Sometimes they look hypnotic-abstract, and sometimes you can guess familiar images in these animated clouds. The miracle of chance, the uniqueness of the moment, the attractiveness of forms – the most successful find of the photographer, who previously became famous for his works completely different from the Black Sun cycle.

Soren Solker has long been known as a portraitist who has been trusted to photograph himself by Björk, The White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, David Lynch, The Arctic Monkeys, REM and U2. His work was both intimate and cinematic. Solker’s photographs were exhibited in museums around the world and were in great demand, but he made an unexpected decision – to return to his native Denmark, to the places where he spent his childhood, and start shooting flocks of starlings. These experimental photos subsequently form the Black Sun cycle.

In the southern Danish marshes, millions of birds congregate and put on an incredible show in the air before migrating; huge flocks act as a single organism. Sometimes birds of prey scare starlings, introducing additional variables into the already chaotic swirls. As a result, Solker managed to shoot a variety of figures: sometimes “simple”, geometric, like a circle or a heart, and sometimes complex, resembling a dog, a butterfly or … one huge bird, resulting from many others, formed like pieces of a puzzle.

Contemplation of works from the Black Sun literally knocks the ground out from under the viewer’s feet. The reality, complexity and vivacity of the subject is in stark contrast to the unreality and artful artificiality of the resulting image. According to Soren Solker himself, who, thanks to this project, opened a second creative wind, the work on the cycle awakened in him a sense of the interpenetration of the real and the mythical, allowing him to “capture a fragment of eternity.”

Via: Cameralabs.org