There’s something appealingly odd about Harri Kallio’s color photographs of dodos in their lush natural habitat, beginning with the fact that they depict a species that went extinct about 150 years before photography was invented. Kallio, a Finnish artist whose previous work includes photographic portraits of moths, first started thinking about the dodo when he reread Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and noticed John Tenniel’s famous drawings of the brawny bird with its tiny wings and enormous hooked beak. “I couldn’t help but laugh,” Kallio recalls in the introduction to his own book, The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters. “Somehow it was hard to believe that once upon a time there really had been something like the Dodo out there in the world.”
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