Tokyo Parrots

Yoshinori Mizutani's Tokyo Parrots follows the feral rose-ringed parakeets, descended from pets brought to Japan in the 1970s, that now flock by the hundreds over Tokyo.

Mizutani has said his first encounter with an enormous flock left him afraid, "like I had fallen into the movie The Birds directed by Hitchcock." That apprehension drove the project: he tracked the birds' daily movements until he located one of their largest nesting sites in a ginkgo tree, then photographed them late in the day with heavy flash, lighting the foreground stark white against skies still carrying the last color of sunset. The resulting images, often freezing birds mid-flight with wings spread against green branches or darkening sky, give the familiar city an unfamiliar, almost hallucinatory charge.

Published by amana/IMA Photobooks in 2014, Tokyo Parrots was an early book from Mizutani, a Tokyo-based photographer whose subsequent work has continued to look at the unnoticed intersections of the urban and the wild. The book has been compared to Masahisa Fukase's Ravens as a color, lower-key counterpart within the same tradition of the city as animal habitat.