Ephemera from Neil Shea (dated 2013). “I was working on a National Geographic story about Lake Turkana with the photographer Randy Olson and one day we took a boat out to this volcanic island. It’s made up of several craters, and we’d come because we’d heard that flamingoes used one of them as a nesting site. We climbed up the first crater, peered over the edge, and beheld something overwhelming—below us a large green lake was almost completely covered with bright pink birds. Randy later estimated from his photos that there were at least 100,000 flamingoes. I’d never seen birds in such numbers, and the mass of them—their sheer life force—unsettled me. Here they were, invisible to the rest of the world, as though trying not to be noticed. We climbed down and explored the lakeshore, wandering among the birds’ now-empty nests. I grabbed a few of these feathers from the shore and stuffed them into one of my notebooks. “

Archival Pigment Print.