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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
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Abstract:
Although John James Audubon's work has often been equated with the lightness and grace of its avian subject matter, his stacks of actual-size bird drawings and "double elephant" prints were in fact massive, cumbersome cargoes that had to be hauled around the Trans-Appalachian West by flatboat, foot, and horseback. Audubon's pictures of birds, in other words, had a much more difficult time navigating through the early American landscape than did the birds themselves. Exploring this paradox, this paper will examine The Birds of America as part of a broader period analysis of the thingness of pictures. The text is a working chapter draft from my current book project: The Transit of Images in Early America: Matter, Memory, and Migration in the Realm of the Pictorial.