Bye Bye Birds
On Scaring Off Birds and Other Necessary Occupations
(Hannes Couvreur, Wange 2025)
What if a scarecrow is more than a functional object? What if, in the moments when we’re not looking, it leads a life of its own? A life in which it sits by the swimming pond, reads a book with a cup of coffee, plays the guitar, gazes at the horses from the fence, or mindlessly scrolls through its phone?
This photo series is an ode to the life that unfolds outside our field of vision, a playful exploration of what can emerge when something — or someone — refuses to be confined by the role others impose on them. What if the scarecrow doesn’t live solely to serve, but also simply to be?
For me as a maker, imagination doesn’t reside only in my mind. When I create, I do so with my whole body: with my eyes, hands, feet, skin, and breath. For this series, I crafted a mask out of straw and rope to bring the scarecrow to life. Making it was just as important as photographing it.
A photograph, too, is not an end product for me, but an action, an event. The magic isn’t in the result, but in the play, the coincidence, the encounter between maker, object, and environment.
Why do I photograph? Because I must. In a world that is often too much, too loud, too incomprehensible, creating is not a choice for me but a way of surviving. As a man with autism and ADD, the search for stability and meaning is a daily occupation. Making art is, for me, an act of hope: I am here, I create, therefore I exist.
Making art is breathing. To find hope, to give hope, to matter.
Echoes of others who inspire me resonate through this work. I’ll name a few.
The poetry of Wisława Szymborska and Mary Oliver, who open up the everyday into something sublime.
The wonder of Reif Larsen’s young cartographer T.S. Spivet.
The visual language of photographers like Anders Petersen, Daniel Meadows, and Duane Michals, who dare to blend the personal with the playful.
The gaze of artist Oliver Jeffers, who takes children and adults equally seriously.
The cinematic dance between memory and imagination in Agnès Varda and JR’s film Faces Places.
And authors like Peter Wharmby and Clara Tornvall, who write about autism with sharpness and tenderness — in a way of looking, living, being that feels deeply familiar.
As long as we play, there is hope.
As long as we imagine, there is life.
As long as I create, I can exist.
