eaves just before the camera’s flash, thrown into shadowed relief on the middle ground of the wall behind. The agile shift from inside to outside here reveals a signature use of multiple lenses—each specially designed by the artist and layered together in various combinations—that allows both shallow and deep focus to occur in the same static moment, sharing the stage with the rippled blur and crease that quivers the surface of Mylayne’s assiduous tableaux.

The furtive nature of his pursuit has been distinct from ornithology’s representative cataloguing from the start as boundary settings predominate, bringing the subject into focus against a rural landscape shaped by man’s labor. Largely devoid of people, remnants of agricultural industry crop up repeatedly, making a recurrent theme of the precarious balance of wildness within a built environment. In keeping with the artist’s discretion, this longstanding though understated motif finds its partial origin in the cryptic inscription adorning the frontispiece of every publication on Mylayne’s work to date, A Monsieur Eustache Clabaut, pour son éternelle amitié (“To Mr. Eustach Clabaut, for his eternal friendship”); formally distant, humble, and always vigilant, Mylayne’s gesture of gratitude recognizes the importance of an old friend having invited the couple to begin their project three decades ago in and around the confines of his farm. It was here, working at his leisure, that the unmatched grace and variation of a bird in flight became the subject of so many early images, entering into Mylayne’s chosen gap and provoking him to devise a system that might capture multiple planes of movement and light while accounting for such a fitful protagonist. 4

The formal ingenuity of the resulting images plays the inherent plausibility of the photographic medium against the visible limit of the still image (and frame); appearing to be set in motion and hence destabilized, the surface of Mylayne’s photographs pulls the viewer further into questioning the legible measure of time and memory. 5 As each image is presented as a unique print without edition, scale is largely determined in accordance to the appearance of the bird in the actual encounter. However, in asserting and underscoring his conceptual premise, Mylayne’s early images often included an idiosyncratic duplication in miniature to the left of the larger print, both a reminder of the diminished vantage of the viewfinder and a nod to the discipline of intervals—the laying in wait. An indication of the artist’s mediated intimacy with his restive subject, Mylayne’s doubling tactic admits and gives contour to the ineluctable rift between man and bird even as it opens up the narrow margins of his developing project. Resonant with the distance Francis Ponge queries in his poem, Swallows or In Swallow Style (1951-56), a displacement of ‘thereness’ in this early structural motif belies Mylayne’s unease with depicting the drama of flight:

They put us, they throw us, in the position of spectators.
…
Isn’t their remoteness, their difference, from us due to the very
fact that what resembles them in us is terribly contradicted,
strained, by their other proximity—to abstract signs: flames or arrows? 6

By gradually transitioning away from flight to birds manifestly at rest, Mylayne has distanced himself from the terrible difference that Ponge assigns to the fleeting arrows of

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