Published by 5 Continents Editions in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon, Jean-Luc Mylayne brings together 68 previously unpublished photographs made between 1992 and 2008. The book offers a focused account of the French photographer’s sustained investigation of birds—not as picturesque subjects, but as elusive participants in carefully constructed encounters.

Mylayne has travelled in search of birds since 1976, working through prolonged observation and preparation. He describes himself as a film director and the birds as actors; each image is organised around their anticipated presence, with season, hour, setting, composition, and focal length treated as interdependent elements. Some photographs require months of preparation. The image is not retouched, and the arrival of the bird at its reserved position marks the completion of the scene.

This method places the book at a productive distance from photography’s familiar emphasis on the decisive moment. Mylayne’s practice attends instead to waiting, intervals, and the gradual formation of a relation between photographer and subject. His lenses are largely fashioned by hand, and the resulting pictures balance precise tonal and compositional control with the unpredictability of a living presence. The photographs are intimate and monumental at once, asking to be considered slowly.

For collectors, the volume is significant as a concentrated presentation of a distinctive body of work: 68 colour photographs drawn from a sixteen-year period, shaped by an unusually deliberate process and published in a bilingual French/English edition. Its 120 pages and near-square 28 × 27 cm hardcover format give the series room to unfold as a sustained sequence rather than a casual selection. It is a considered introduction to an artist whose subject is inseparable from his discipline of looking—and from the time required for an image to arrive.