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“…[There’s a] new edition of the book “The New York Pigeon: Behind the Feathers,” by Andrew Garn, a photographer and writer. For more than 15 years, he has been capturing the oft-loathed birds with studio-style images — dark backgrounds, dramatic lighting and seemingly meaningful expressions….[Garn says] in the introduction to the book that it is as hard to imagine New York City without pigeons as it is to think of the Everglades without alligators or Antarctica without penguins….“Pigeons are our nature…” –The New York Times
Humans have always bred, farmed, raced, and lived alongside pigeons. Some of us shoo them away and others care for them as the city’s most famous wildlife. The New York Pigeon, now in its second edition with spectacular new images, is a one-of-a-kind, intimate study of this worldwide neighbor.
The New York Pigeon reveals the unexpected beauty of the omnipresent pigeon as if Vogue devoted its pages to birds, not fashion models. In spite of pigeons’ ubiquity in New York and other cities, we never really see them closely and know very little about their function in the urban ecosystem. This book brings to light the intriguing history, behavior, and splendor of a bird so often overlooked.
While The New York Pigeon is primarily a photography book, it also tells the five-thousand-year story of the feral pigeon. Why are pigeons so successful in cities and not in the countryside? Why do they have such diverse plumage? How have pigeons adapted to survive on almost any food? Why are pigeons able to fly up to 500 miles per day but rarely do? How did Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner teach pigeons to do complicated tasks, from tracking missile targets to recognizing individual human faces? Why can pigeons see in the ultraviolet light spectrum, and why is half of their brain used for visual perception?
The second edition of The New York Pigeon, with its fresh portraiture and new essay from Catherine Quayle of the Wild Bird Fund, presents dramatic, hyper-real studio portraits capturing the personalities, expressiveness, glorious feather iridescence, and deeply hued eyes of the New York pigeon.
Andrew Garn is a native New Yorker who grew up surrounded by pigeons and has photographed, rehabilitated, and observed Columba Livia since 2008, when he first exhibited photographs, video installations, and sculptures of pigeons at A.M. Richard Fine Art in Brooklyn, NY. Documenting the entire spectrum of development, including full-grown pigeons, newborns, babies and “squeakers,” he has grown to love these birds.
Garn is a fine art and editorial photographer whose work has been widely exhibited and appeared in the pages of numerous magazines including the New York Times magazine, Fortune, Forbes, Interview, Vogue, Vibe, Time, Newsweek, DerSpiegel, FrenchPhoto, ElleDécor, NewYork, and Bloomberg. He is also the recipient of grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the J.M. Kaplan Fund, among others.
His previous books include Exit to Tomorrow: The History of the Future, Subway Style: Architecture and Design of the NYC Subway (winner of the New York Society Book Award) The Houseboat Book, and Bethlehem Steel.
She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2018 and a Women in Power fellow at the 92Y in 2019.
Before joining The Times, Ms. Rueb contributed to The Financial Times in London, BBC Radio and Television in Scotland, Time Out Paris and Cleveland Magazine.