We know that I started Frank’s corpus on March 21, 2017. We know that I have taken 82,438 pho­tographs since then, including today’s 115, whereas in all the dig­ital years before that, I took 6,085 pho­tographs. We know without ques­tion that since March 21, 2017, I have mostly taken photos of scrub jays. Therefore, according to Peter, “the average pic can be assumed to be a birdpic.”

Reading Frank’s Corpus

For sev­eral years, I’ve fol­lowed Elis­a­beth Nicula’s doc­u­men­ta­tion of the scrub jays who alight on her back porch. The images are reli­ably inter­esting—birds caught in strange motion, or super close-up, or both—but it’s Elis­a­beth her­self who brings the project to life, with her win­ning cap­tions (narrating the pol­i­tics of the porch: there are crows, a cat, and the sad sack squirrel known as Cindy the Barfer) and her simple persistence.

Now, for SFMOMA’s Open Space web­site, Elis­a­beth has written a com­pre­hen­sive essay about the project, and it knocked my socks off.

Framing the scale of the imagery, she writes:

Let me be honest: when I saw the link, I pre­pared myself to read this essay with, shall we say, “dutiful interest”. That’s totally fine; I’ll bet