Birds

A childhood encounter with a crow at a zoo led to a lifetime fascination with avian life for the American artist Jim Dine. This encounter with the bird was perceived by the young Dine with a mixture of fear, fascination and a deeper understanding of his unconscious world, and from it grew a mythic personal symbolism, which he explores in Birds, a series of remarkable black-and-white photographs. Here, an everyday, unspectacular bird might appear to the beholder as a character of mythol…