Man with Golden Eagle on Fist, Winter Woodland, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Man with Golden Eagle on Fist, Winter Woodland, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Man with Golden Eagle on Fist, Winter Woodland, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-722173

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Somewhere in a bare-limbed American woodland, with snow still on the ground, a middle-aged man in a denim chore coat stands holding a golden eagle on his ungloved fist with the calm confidence of someone who has done this long enough to know the bird won't take his face off — probably. Falconry in postwar America was a deeply eccentric hobby practiced by a small, self-serious brotherhood who regarded it as the last legitimate link to medieval nobility, a distinction that meant rather less in a country that had never had any. The bird, wings half-spread and beak forward, is cooperating in the way eagles cooperate: tolerating the arrangement while making clear it has not agreed to it. The man's expression is the expression of every hobbyist who has finally gotten someone with a camera to witness the thing he has been talking about at dinner for years. He looks satisfied, the eagle looks neutral, and together they have produced the exact portrait he intended.

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