If you took the time to inspect some of Ethan’s pictures, he hopes that you enjoyed them and noticed the effort he put into both their acquisition and curation. He also understands if you may have noticed something else: Most of them aren’t very good. Indeed, after you account for his expensive equipment as well as the time and resources he would have certainly needed to even place himself in proximity to some of the birds depicted, you would be forgiven for expecting him to have created something much more impressive. I have a simple explanation. Ethan is not a photographer. Ethan is not an artist of any kind. You may have also mistook him for a birder. That is far closer to the truth but is still not a perfect fit. After all, he does not use binoculars and desires something much more tangible than a list. So what is Ethan doing?

Until the beginning of the 20th Century and the arrival of effective binoculars, birding as it is now practiced was not a practical endeavor. Instead, in a manner perhaps more suited to the spirit of the age, the proto-birders of the day, ornithologists and amateur “naturalist” types would simply shoot any birds that aroused their interest and then identify, preserve, and assemble them into massive collections, serving as trophies as much as specimens. Ethan is the spiritual successor to the worst of these men. His camera is not a tool of artistic creation but one of metaphysical destruction. Instead of mangled bodies, he hoards blurry, partially obscured photographs. In the act of capturing the light reflected off of a bird, he is capturing the bird itself, possessing it and incorporating it into an ever-growing menagerie. Occasionally, Ethan will find one of his pictures to be aesthetically appealing but this will be a mere accident, a side effect of the hundreds of thousands of photographs taken in a monomaniacal quest of biological excess whose only concern is whether or not a positive identification can be made. In the end, Ethan uses a high-end camera not to make good images extraordinary but to make illegible images legible.

Ultimately, remember that these images are not works of art but a collection of specimens, useless to modern science and reflecting outdated and centuries-old ideas tinged by imperialism and a belief in human supremacy over and domination of nature. It is a collection whose only purpose is to serve as a futile attempt to glorify its creator and his equally futile quest to photographically document every bird on Earth.