Janne Lehtinen: Sacred Bird

The dream of flight is as old as humanity. Icarus dreamt of it, Leonardo da Vinci worked at it, and since the middle of the last century, a select few have been realizing it in outer space. Finnish photographer Janne Lehtinen has also dreamed of defying gravity. His Sacred Bird series presents quietly powerful portraits of the artist about to take off, wearing a range of peculiar apparatuses--standing on a hillside waiting for a breeze to lift a pair of dragonfly-like wings or crouching on a high-dive over a snow-covered lake in what look like the wings from a child's fairy costume--attempts as absurd as they are stirring. Lehtinen's work is complicated by the fact that his father is a well-known glider pilot: these photographs are not just an homage to the myth of flying and to the landscapes to which Lehtinen finds himself tethered, but also an autobiographical investigation.