Hot Shots : Todd Forsgren
Artist Statement
To create his paintings, John James Audubon shot birds and contorted their bodies into dramatic poses by wiring and pinning them onto boards. The quirky and flamboyant postures he used were not immediately popular with the scientific community, but today they are renowned.
It was Roger Tory Peterson who pioneered the idea of a field guide. His guides highlight observable marks, pointed out by carefully placed arrows, which allow for the identification of birds at a distance. Peterson painted thousands of systematic illustrations of birds in static poses which he based on photographs, bird skins, and field observations. Field guides have allowed hobbyists, artists, and scientists to identify birds with binoculars instead of a shotgun.
Ornithologists now use mist nets instead of shotguns. These nearly invisible nets are set up like fences and function as huge spider webs, catching unsuspecting birds. The researcher carefully extracts the bird from the net. Each bird is measured, aged, sexed, and banded with an individually numbered anklet. Then the bird is released.
I photographed these birds while they are caught in mist nets, moments before the ornithologist extracts them. Here, the birds inhabit a fascinating space between our framework of the bush and the hand. It is a fragile and embarrassing moment before they disappear back into the woods, and into data.
Biography
I grew up along the shores of Lake Erie, just west of Cleveland, Ohio along a major migratory bird flyway. John James Audubon's Monograph, Birds of America, and Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America were the first pieces of artwork I loved. I spent days studying and trying to emulate Peterson and Audubon as a bird-watching teenager.
As an undergraduate at Bowdoin College in Maine, I studied biology, focusing on using molecular biology to explore ecosystem ecology. However, when I picked up a camera during my senior year, I realized that my youthful passions of bird watching and gardening lay in photography, not biology. When I graduated in 2003, my consuming desire was to take pictures.
Since then, I have traveled widely with my camera. My work grew substantially in 2004-2005, when I studied at the SMFA in Boston for a year. I've recently been an artist-in-residence at the Sitka Center in Oregon and I-Park in Connecticut.
Aside from the bird photographs in this portfolio, I have spent much of my time photographing urban and community based agriculture projects. This project has taken me across the US and to Cuba. I'm now living in Mongolia as a Fulbright Fellow, photographing the new horticulture projects that have recently become popular here.