The Chickens of Cappadocia
The fowl in these capricious yet beautiful images are indigenous to the environment in which they were composited—Cappadocia, Turkey. The first impression upon viewing these images is a sense of equal parts fun and mastery. As much attention is put into the formal qualities of the work as is given to their droll subject matter. In many of the images, the shapes of the chickens with their cockscombs and feathers are put into dialogue with similar rock formations. We see a full treatment of the landscape photography form, as well as a surreal/pop portraiture of creatures all too familiar, yet equally odd as they appear in Swain's compositions.
In the Romantic tradition, these landscapes often convey the sublimity of nature being surveyed by the lone individual. The unfamiliar, exotic quality of these selected landscapes creates the sense of mystery and surprise, with the chicken as some sort of Romantic "high priest." Here, however, this priest has been ironically supplanted by the chicken, who is humorously elevated to something approaching nobility and the heroic.
Besides the chickens' comical air, the artist relies on the universality of the chickens themselves. The first representations of chickens in Europe are found on Corinthian pottery of the 7th-century BCE. The poet Cratinus (mid-5th century BCE) calls the chicken "the Persian alarm." There are twenty-four billion chickens in the world now, making it the most abundant bird on the planet. Thus, the archetypal "hero" has become, in these images, poultry instead of "man."
