Review: Airlines – Bird Tracks in the Air

July 12th, 2022 – December 30th, 2022

Tracks in the sand, snow or e.g. the feeding track of a snail may tell the observer who has left his “footprint”. But not all traces are visible to humans or they fade away with time: like the sound of a melody, the circles of an eagle in the sky or the path of a housefly in the air. Munich-based photo artist Lothar Schiffler has long been dedicated to such invisible traces. Using complex photographic and video techniques, he traces the flight paths of swifts, buzzards, cranes, insects and even flying seeds.

However, the possibilities of photography, i.e. writing with light, are not suitable for recording the movements in the air. Therefore, he uses exactly the opposite, i.e. writing with shadows, the so-called iskiography. Thousands of individual images of selected video passages are brought together with the most modern digital photographic technology and enable the reconstruction of a track of movement in the air. Comparable to the score of a piece of music, a flight track is captured with the help of iskiography and the moment of simultaneous emergence and decay can be perceived.

The reconstruction of the movement tracks of birds, which Lothar Schiffler records on a local scale, also has tangible scientific aspects. Ornithologists are using increasingly sophisticated technical methods to reconstruct the global movements of migratory birds, for example.