Literary Chickens

From the best-selling photographer of Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time , here are grand, platinum-palladium portraits of Gallus gallus.

Funny, fierce, and flamboyant, heritage-breed chickens assess the camera in black and white. Like marble busts, Beth Moon's focus on the birds' faces reveals character traits about the birds and - if we look long enough - about ourselves.

Moon's approach is underscored with pairings from classic literature, which - rather than simply anthropomorphising the birds - acknowledges their souls. The proud Silver Appenzellar Spitzhauben is flanked by a description of a poet, from George Eliot's Middlemarch. A plump Black Sumatra illuminates a particularly Dostoyevskian paragraph from The Brothers Karamazov. And a relatively plain, wrinkle-eyed Reza Asla mirrors a description of a preacher from James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain.

From the camera of one of the greatest living chroniclers of nature, beautifully designed and printed, here is an art book for lovers of photography, great literature, and of course, chickens.

With a foreword by actress, filmmaker, and philanthropist Isabella Rossellini.

Book Features:

• Chickens continue to be a steadily growing trend.
• The book appeals to a wide range of customers: backyard chicken owners, heritage-breed foodies, book lovers, photography lovers, and - with a foreword by Isabella Rossellini, an afterword by Jane Goodall, and essays by a best-selling author and a cultural critic - animal lovers.
• The book pairs the chicken "portraits" with excerpts from classic literature, from Beowulf to James Baldwin, making it also a book about books.

52 duotone illustrations

About the Author

Beth Moon is a photographer based in New York who has gained international recognition for her large-scale, richly toned platinum prints. Her prints are held in numerous public and private collections and have appeared in more than sixty solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Italy, England, France, Israel, Brazil, Dubai, Singapore, and Canada, receiving widespread critical acclaim.