The Weight of Wingbeats

My first instinct was to look away. I have grown tired of the way we romanticize flight, as if the act of leaving the ground is some grand, poetic escape from the gravity of our own lives. We see birds and we project our own longing for weightlessness onto them, ignoring the frantic, repetitive labor required just to stay aloft. It is easy to admire the grace of a wing, but it is harder to acknowledge the sheer exhaustion of the bird. I wanted to see this as just another postcard of a place that has been photographed into oblivion, a landscape that has lost its mystery to the relentless gaze of the traveler. But then, I stopped looking for the scenery and started looking at the motion. There is a strange, jarring honesty in the way these creatures occupy the air, a reminder that existence is rarely about soaring—it is about the constant, desperate negotiation with the wind. What happens to the sky when the birds finally land?

Derya Yazar Atasever has captured this tension in the image titled Pigeon Valley. It forces a pause in the middle of all that frantic movement, doesn’t it?