Revamped Victorian Photography Imagines Anonymous Aristocrats As Birds

Photographer Sara Angelucci, fuses science and and the supernatural by merging people with mysterious birds.

February 16, 2016, 4:40pm

Photographer Sara Angelucci is a veritable scholar on the Victorian period— a quick glimpse at her latest photo series Aviary confirms her immersion immersed in the long-dead culture. Regarding the project's description, Angelucci waxes eloquent about the juxtapositions of colonial entitlement, scientific curiosity, a rising interest in photography, and a newfound public perception of spirituality. By fusing stiff, Victorian portraits with the feathers and faces of birds, Angelucci seeks to "embody many themes of the nineteenth century," and expose her ruffled feathers to the many problematic issues of the time.

Due to, through urban development, scientific experimentation, collecting, and hunting, humanity's oppression over the creatures of flight, Angelucci chose birds as the subjects of her Cronenberg-friendly work. "Shooting," she writes, "a word associated with hunting, also lent itself perfectly to the idea of pointing a lens and capturing an image." The artist cites statistics about pigeons getting wiped out by the millions due to urbanization, all while taxidermy grew in popularity.

In the 19th Century, a family's possessions expressed class status and cultural sophistication. On top of taxidermied birds being a status symbol, photos and photo albums themselves were valued objects— especially as centerpieces in a house's parlour room. "The parlour became a microcosm of society, expressing the customs of the times, and the interests and desires of those who inhabited them," explains Angelucci. Families wanted more photos, more objects for their homes, and the process of collecting grew more and more.

During this time, the Spiritualist Movement was also blooming, and photography and spirituality formed a connection. Photographers began to take advantage of a willing public's belief in the afterlife by taking poorly exposed portraits and telling family members the blurry forms in the background were images of deceased family members. "Spirit Photography," it was called.

Aviary connects these seemingly-disparate facets of the era, expressing "a conflation of interests where the family photo album, with its role of commemoration, is brought together with natural science and spiritual emanations." The photo portraits of anonymous citizens and the pieces of endangered animals share the truth that they are, in Angelucci's words, "creatures about to become ghosts."

The work illustrates a "hybrid crossover of faith in science with a belief in otherworldly beings," a nuanced exploration of the past through photo-manipulations that could easily be misconstrued as decontextualized Tumblr humor. Aviary is a stunning, often-melancholic multi-disciplinary project that keeps us coming back because of its layered plumage. Finding beauty in the macabre was something Victorian artists excelled at, and Angelucci's project— which you can view in its entirety here— upholds that tradition completely.