Having in his own words “sold everything to begin the project—the house, the car, everything,” French artist Jean Luc Mylayne and his wife and collaborator, Mylène Mylayne, opted long ago for a path determined by the restless, shifting focus of his photographs,
namely birds. 2 Embracing a radical turn away from the workaday schedule of commerce and commute to the patient demands of fieldwork, Mylayne’s entire corpus bears the enduring mark of leaving behind the concerns of conventional time. As he himself recounts, “we bought the equipment, and we went to work, and for years we worked together all alone, without really talking to anyone.” The migratory pull of their setting out on an open-ended journey evokes a lesser definition of ‘turn’, as “a choice, a talent” was pursued in the decision to uproot everything and follow the subtle dictates of encounter.

From small rural farms in northern France where many of Jean Luc Mylayne’s first images were taken to repeated sojourns to the American Southwest in recent years, the artist has sought out precise backdrops to rendezvous with such commonplace birds as sparrows, thrushes, bluebirds, and wrens. Eschewing the site-specificity of a naturalist, Mylayne’s overriding interest in location brings to mind the mise-en-scène of cinema, scouted and chosen for its framing potential rather than any strict depiction of habitat. Consideration of daylight, camera angle, flora, weather and even the occasional prop or use of artificial lighting

outweighs any fidelity to documenting species or terrain, for Mylayne’s pursuit is, in the end, a register of ontological awareness rather than an index. Indeed, the fixed camera position, pre-determined frame, and simplified action recall nothing so much as structural filmmaking of the late 1960s and ‘70s—including experiments by such divergent artists as Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and Hollis Frampton—in its attempt to “orchestrate duration as a significant challenge,” to borrow a phrase from film historian P. Adams Sitney. 4

Often taking months, sometimes years to accomplish, Mylayne’s images distill a fine tension from the highly constructed process of prefigured compositions and the rush and pivot of a perpetually agitated subject. Once allowed into the larger corpus, an image is noted not by location or specific bird trait but according to the time required to exact the contour of its encounter, just as a given number indicates its sequence within the overall project—considered as it is an ongoing whole. No. 4 June July August, 1979, and No. 6, June July August 1979, for example, reveal an early interest in doubling the inherent frame of the camera through the gaps, nooks, and slatted views to be discovered around a farmyard; in No. 4 a roughhewn window cut into a barn wall centers the dip and trace of a swallow in midflight—empty ground, whitewashed walls, and sloping red-tiled roofs rising into focus beyond—while No. 5 lowers the pastoral aperture to the bottom left as the bird’s form careens up and into the

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