- Raft Press 2025
- Hardback, 1st edition, 64p
- New
‘A starling is, in short, exceedingly beautiful. Yet one reason we tend not to dwell on the otherness of starling aesthetics is the fact that they have come to live so close by us, nesting in our houses, feeding on our lawns, or across our rubbish dumps, or from garbage bins, or by the sprinklers at the sewage works, or on the motorway hard shoulder. Or they strut a roundabout island amid the rush-hour traffic. We are so habituated to their presence that, like everything else in our lives, we smear them over with our sense of the everyday. And they become ordinary. We have to look with real intent, as Jem Southam has done when taking his own starling images, to recover the sheer magic of our world.’
– Mark Cocker from the book’s essay.
The photographs in Starlings were made on one afternoon in December 2023 at Ham Wall, a wetland wildlife sanctuary managed by the RSPB in Somerset. The images show the stillness of late afternoon as the starlings fly in to roost. As the book progresses, thousands of birds are shown in full flight before disappearing with the coming of darkness.
It is thought that up to a million starlings roost at the Avalon Marshes at Ham Wall. Some of the birds inhabit the marshes year-round, and others migrate from colder countries in continental Europe as northern winter descends and contribute to this staggering number of birds. During the day they travel up to 20 miles to feed and return in the afternoon, an hour or so before sunset. Southam’s photographs capture the spectacle of the starling flocks populating the sky before flying down to roost for the night, leaving the skies empty once more.
Special edition (in hardback) with a signed and dated 12x10" print as shown.
