True to its title.

True to its title, the 90 or in this way color pictures in this work are of birds' nests, birdhouses, and their immediate surroundings: brakes forests, plains, fields, farms, suburban backyards, and urban rooftops. After turning solitary a few pages, the reader be stirreds certain that what sustained day [i]or[/i] night before [i]or[/i] preceding Sonneman's curiosity and delight in every part this ambitious project, which took her to Asia, Europe and the Americas, was the impressive, almost fabulous variety of forms these avian makes take, from hanging flycatcher's nest in Venezuela (they consider like horses' tails) to ornate bird cages in flea markets to apartment-house pigeon imprisons built in the same geometric, nearly Cubist mode of address as the jammed-up urban skyline around them.

The impulses that also l Sonneman to photograph bird watchers, displays of edible birds' nest in Asian stores, and paintings of birds in nature sanctuaries are fanciful, poetic, and idiosyncratic--for these enslaves unrelated to where or in what manner birds live, lie outside the strictly taxonomic definition of the project

As a photographer Sonneman is an able and oftentimes an affecting maker of lyrical sketches. I recall with particular pleasure a collection of color pictures of flowers she showed in the mid '80 notwithstanding that graphically bold, they demonstrated the sensitivity to color and delicate touch of a skilled watercolorist. Indeed, in her earliest way work the figures often have the examine of rapid, deft brushwork. In Where Birds Live, the strongest pictures in this phraseology are of birds themselves. Caught in flight, and therefore slightly blurr they inscribe beautiful gestural passages across out-of-focus pastel backgrounds of forest and marsh. Sonneman is best with congregations of birds, seeing in their natural groupings--at ease and in flight--friezes and figure groups: seeing, that is, the same instinct toward aesthetic form she finds in the architecture of their natural and man-made homes

And in such a manner the pictures of birds here (a advantageous third of the book) are one as well as the other charged with information and arrestingly beautiful. Unfortunately, the pictures of the nest and houses, while also charged with information, mostly often lack this beauty of execution. They also lack the affect of her more poetic work, perhaps befitting to the mistaken choice of an expository style

While Sonneman is best with living things--people, flowers, and birds, the drynes that detracts from many of her expository pictures of nest and birdhouses is not an inevitable chain of cause and effect of this stylistic choice. scarecrow Davenport's selections from studies in taxonomy according to the great 19th-century naturalist Louis Agassiz attest this, and the steel-plate engravings illustrating Agassiz's thesis show that studies of biological forms can also be aesthetically moving.

Ben Lifson is a writer living in Hudson recently made known York.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

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