Between Light and Shadow, Flight and Stillness: The Hidden Depths of Elliot Ross’s Crows Ascending
Welcome to this edition of [book spotlight]. Today, we uncover the layers of 'Crows Ascending,' by Elliot Ross (published by Schilt Publishing & Gallery). We'd love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist's work.
Some images are made with intention. Others emerge from necessity.
Crows Ascending wasn’t planned—it happened because of a moment, a photographic accident, and a long stretch of isolation. At first, Elliot Ross was just photographing crows outside his apartment window, watching their movements change with light and speed. Then, one image—of a crow mid-flight, its body almost dissolving—made him look closer.
What if a photographic accident could reveal something deeper?
A moment that wasn’t planned, an image that wasn’t expected—yet something about it feels important. Sometimes meaning isn’t created; it’s discovered.
Crows Ascending is about transformation, loss, and the spaces in between. It’s about how something as ordinary as a bird in flight can take on weight beyond itself. How an image can hold emotion without explanation. Elliot Ross spent months photographing crows before he understood why.
The Book
Crows Ascending is a poignant photographic series by Elliot Ross, featuring a series of striking duotone images of crows in flight, captured from his apartment in San Francisco during the pandemic. The project, born from isolation and personal loss, evolved into a meditation on movement, transformation, and memory.
The book includes 20 carefully curated photographs, presented in a 48-page hardcover edition with a unique fold-out end sheet displaying the images as a cohesive sequence. Designed by Victor Levie of Levievandermeer, Crows Ascending is both a personal tribute—to Ross’s late brother and those affected by COVID-19—and a study of how a fleeting moment can hold deeper significance. (Schilt Publishing & Gallery, Amazon)
Overview of the project: What inspired you to create Crows Ascending, and what themes or messages did you aim to convey through this body of work?
Crows Ascending began with a photographic accident. I had been photographing crows for some months from the windows of my apartment, capturing how their bodies are transformed (in ways that sometimes created a kind of symbolic resonance) while they performed different activities like preening, when I found I had photographed a crow just as it was about to take to the air from a nearby roof. I then started to explore this type of image because I found it highly dynamic and emotionally compelling. In fact, the crow was seemingly transformed into some kind of hybrid bird and insect. I had no preconceived theme or message in mind.
This was in 2020. I was recovering from a serious illness and in semi-isolation because of the Covid pandemic. In 2021 my younger brother and older sister were hospitalized with severe cases of Covid. They both survived, but my brother died a few months later from Parkinson’s Disease-related pneumonia.
By 2022 I thought the project was complete. At that point I realized that Crows Ascending wouldn’t have existed in its present form if I hadn’t been forced to spend so many months at home avoiding a Covid infection. It was then that I dedicated the series to those who suffered from Covid, and to the memory of my brother Michael. I also included a reminder that much suffering and death was caused by deliberate American government inaction previous to the Biden administration.
Was there a particular image that made you realize this project was becoming something deeper?
No, it was only when I was assembling them together.
Symbolism of crows in your work: Crows often carry rich symbolic meanings in various cultures. How do you interpret the presence of crows in your photographs, and what do they represent within the context of this project?
Though I am aware that crows can symbolize death (i.e. murder of crows), transformation, etc. in different cultures. I had no symbolism in mind when I photographed them. That is not to say that I don’t, being a human with a symbolic mind, have my own thoughts about what they symbolize to me. But I try to never put these thoughts into words. I find conceptualization interferes with the visual process. According to some researchers, the left hemisphere of the brain, where we think in words, “overshadows” the right hemisphere where we think in pictures, once we describe an image in words.
As for interpreting the presence of crows I will follow the example of painter Francis Bacon who once said that he never interprets the meaning of his work.
Exploration of the natural world: Your work reflects a poignant connection to nature. How did you approach capturing the interplay between the natural environment and the subjects within your images?
Thank you for saying that.
Since I photographed the crows in an urban environment, there is very little interplay between them and the (non-human) natural world beyond what they had with other members of their flock, and that is not the focus of Crows Ascending. That said, my connection to (non-human) nature grows with every observation of animal or plant life that I make and with every photograph that I work on. In most of my other photographs of animals, I am almost exclusively concerned with individuals with little to no environment (either natural or artificial) around them. I can’t say why I chose this approach, but it has led me to think about individuality and how, and to what degree, it might exist even among the most social of animals.
What is it about isolating a subject that feels more compelling to you than showing it in context?
Though I wasn’t thinking (at least consciously) of them when I began making my animal photographs, portrait artists going back at least to the Romans, and including, since then, Bronzino, Velasquez, Soutine (sometimes), Avedon, Irving Penn, and many others have isolated their subjects in front of a plain, or relatively featureless, background.
To my mind, isolating the figure this way concentrates one’s focus on the physical and emotional being of the portrayed, whether human or other species.
Technical and aesthetic choices: What equipment and techniques did you employ to achieve the visual style of Crows Ascending, and how did these choices influence the mood and narrative of the series?
I used a Sony DSLR, and later, a Sony mirrorless camera, because they both have internal stabilization, and I have a slight tremor in my hands.. I used a 100-600 mm zoom lens with a 2x teleconverter. No tripod because I had to move about quickly. I used a variety of slower shutter speeds to capture movement.
The choice of slow shutter speeds made for a variety of transformations in the crow images. Most are wholly unexpected. A crow’s wings, with their long primary feathers and beautiful proportions are extremely graceful in flight, and the slower shutter speeds allowed me to capture more of that gracefulness than could ever be seen with the naked eye.
Challenges during the project: What were some of the significant challenges you faced while developing this project, both in terms of logistics and creative expression, and how did you overcome them?
The only significant challenge was dealing with the sheer weight of the lens (5 pounds) and camera while holding it at an upward angle—without a tripod—waiting for the crows to take flight. Exercise to improve my upper body strength helped increase the time I could maintain these stressful and increasingly painful positions. But I still lost many opportunities when I had to lower the camera because my shoulders and wrists were aching with fatigue.
Integration of light and shadow: Light plays a crucial role in photography. How did you utilize natural or artificial lighting to enhance the themes and emotions conveyed in your images?
All the images in Crows Ascending were shot under natural light conditions. Because of the slow shutter speeds, there were a great many overexposures, but these were easily overcome in the digital imaging/printing phase. In this respect, I don’t think the project would have been printable had I been using a film camera, the negatives being too dense for the light from an enlarger lamp to penetrate.
Influence of literature or art: Were there any literary works, artworks, or other forms of media that influenced the conceptualization and execution of Crows Ascending?
The title is a play on that of the poem The Lark Ascending by the Victorian Englishman George Meredith and the short musical piece of the same name by English composer Ralph Vaughn Williams. Those who are familiar with the poem will know that much of it describes the beauty of the lark’s song, just as Vaughn Williams seeks to portray the beauty of the lark’s song using the sound of the solo violin.
The crow’s song is quite different, however, from the song of the lark. And so, the title becomes ironic in a sense. In another sense, if you think of the beauty of the crows in flight as a substitute for the beauty of the lark’s song, it becomes less so.
Audience engagement and interpretation: What reactions or interpretations have you observed from viewers of Crows Ascending, and how do these perspectives align with or differ from your original intentions?
I’ve been enormously gratified with people’s reactions so far. One of my favorite comments, because it seems to have baffled her intellect but not her emotions, came from a woman who said, “I want to say something insightful about it, but all I can say is that I love it.”
Others have described it in writing as “deeply contemplative;” “an eloquent meditation;” “a powerful metaphor of earthly escape;” “very moving;” “very sensitive;” that it “combines the personal story of your brother, the Covid period—one of the strangest we have experienced—and the freedom of the crows, often seen as ‘birds of misfortune;’ ” and that it is “a beautiful visual poem with a touching (and damning) dedication.”
The fact that these are emotional responses aligns well with how I would like all my work to be experienced.
Advice for emerging photographers: For photographers aspiring to create evocative and symbolically rich work, what insights from your experience with Crows Ascending would you share to guide their creative journeys?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I feel most excited and pleased when I am discovering something, whether it be a new (to me) digital technique or an aspect of an animal subject that I wasn’t aware of before or even a new feeling about something. My advice would be to open yourself to having a sense of wonder and discovery and to keep chasing that experience.
The first audience you will have for your work is yourself, so it is important, I think, to make yourself as knowledgeable as you can (about photography, art in general, your subjects, the world, the universe) so you can evaluate the quality of your work at the highest, most sophisticated level.
I personally don’t intentionally try to create work that is symbolic, but I am open to discovering symbolic significance in what I photograph. “Significance” not in the sense of meaning, as in deciphering a code, but something that I find emotionally important and worthy of attention.
To discover more about this intriguing body of work and how you can acquire your own copy, you can find and purchase the book here. (Schilt Publishing & Gallery, Amazon)
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