Falconer
Falconer is a series I shot in Stanley, New Mexico while on assignment with the magazine East Mountain Living’s bird columnist Tom Smylie. I wanted to focus on the intimate physicality of working with the bird, Jean-Luc, in contrast to photographs of the larger-scale grandeur of hunting and flying in this vast empty plain that ended up in the magazine.
As Smylie described what he and the powerful Jean-Luc were doing, it was clear that their relationship was one of trust and ritual. It was a tradition, with a few modern tools like GPS collars and cell phones thrown in, that had been played out the same way for thousands of years.
