From June through July 2020, I tracked down and photographed pigeons in New Haven, Bridgeport, and New York City. To many, pigeons are the unwanted blemishes we photoshop out of pictures. But to me, they are charming and comedic, with piercing eyes and an amazing range of feather patterns. We are co-inhabitants of the city, and urban life is as much theirs as it is our own. Our infrastructure and the by-products of consumerism have not only sustained pigeons but enabled them to thrive, and yet we consider these birds abject and alien from ourselves.
My project for the Mellon Interdisciplinary Humanities Summer Fellowship aims to redefine pigeons in the public eye. In challenging the misconception of pigeons-as-pests, I grapple with beauty-dependent conceptions of value and the imagined division between “civilization” and “wilderness.” To tell this story, I not only photographed hundreds of pigeons but interviewed the people living in cities alongside them. You can read my final project essay here.
