If birds could draw

You're only convinced you know exactly what something looks like until you try to draw it. Then you sit in front of the sheet of paper, and the lines and shapes you draw with a pencil across the white simply don't capture what you have so clearly in mind or in front of you. The spacing seems inconsistent, the proportions wrong, the details too universal.

Anyone who wants to draw something has to look very closely, meticulously memorizing every line and every flourish. Movement complicates the task even further; a single shake or a gust of wind is enough to mess up sketches. In the end, you've only captured a moment anyway; what breathes and grows can look different the next, and what can't be drawn is usually time.

It generally doesn't take much to capture a flock of birds in its simplest form on a sheet of paper. Two small sheets of paper, and a bird adorns the sky of the drawing landscape. Of course, whether a white stork or a common tern is flying through the air is far from visible. And even the formations and dives disappear behind the pencil lines.

What lines would birds themselves draw in the sky? What marks would their bodies leave in the air if they could? Spanish photographer Xavi Bou wondered this one day. So he decided to capture every moment of their movements with his camera, showing the past, present, and future of their flights all at once. A drawing of time, if you will.

"Ornithographies" is the name of the project with which Xavi Bou aims to make the flight paths of birds, and thus the invisible, visible. Using a video camera, the 45-year-old records the animals' activities in nature, later filtering out individual shots from the material and condensing them into a work on the computer until the selected images overlap and the silhouettes of the birds disappear.

What remains as a flight pattern often has nothing to do with the outlines of the individual birds. Sometimes lines flutter around rocks like ribbons around gymnasts, sometimes coils like barbed wire block access to the sky. Spots darken the daytime sky like ink, and arcs and circles reveal the shapes that flocks of birds adopt to conserve energy and protect themselves from predators.

Xavi Bou first studied geology and then photography. He took his first pictures for "Ornithographies" in 2015. For a long time, he worked primarily as an advertising and fashion photographer. Today, his schedule is dictated by nature. His works are also intended as a call to look up at the sky more often and observe every wing beat closely. Perhaps as if planning to draw it.

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