WHILE SEATED

Phonar, the “free and open undergraduate photography class” at Coventry University in the UK, tackled Unphotographable this month, with students making multimedia presentations based on my text. Josie Sutton produced my favorite piece, based on this from 2007.

“This is a picture I did not take of an illustration of a bluebird on a page torn from a child’s textbook, nor is this a picture of the illustration as it fell from the low branches of a tree, where it had been trapped like trash beside a plastic bag, and when the page was blown from the tree, it fell to the ground slowly, the illustration facing me like a reminder of a bluebird, and when it landed at my feet, the illustration spun a bit in the wind, as if the bird knew it wasn’t meant for this, and would try everything it could to flap up off that page.”