It all began with a thud against the kitchen window one day. A Tufted Titmouse gave up the ghost on photographer Leah Sobsey’s porch. Her instinct to take pictures was triggered, as were childhood memories of wooden drawers of Chicago Field’s Museum collection filled with thousands of dead birds. The birds had been collected and given the full works as taxidermy experts made them ready for viewing in their new life after death as part of one of the Museum’s many compelling natural history exhibits.
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The human urge to college, to catalogue, to organize and preserve—from where does this compulsion come? Perhaps it is purely empirical, a belief that we can only study what we possess, and that as stewards of the earth, the material realm is at our fingertips. Like many before her, Sobsey was drawn to this, and in May 2008, she was awarded a residency at the Grand Canyon.
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