Alana Perino

Pictures of Birds is a photographic series moving through ecologies of family, place, mortality, and regeneration. In this work, photography serves as a spectral correspondence in and around Perino’s parental home on the barrier island of Longboat Key, where their parents chose to live and die.

The series emerged as the artist returned to Longboat Key to be with their father and stepmother as their health declined—a period when familial roles shifted and the island became newly charged. The images attend to unstable boundaries between body and landscape, animal and mineral, presence and absence.

Grief in this work is not a singular event but a condition that precedes and exceeds loss, accumulating through proximity and the repetition of looking. The series considers relationships between body and environment, attending to ancestorship and cycles of death across generations.

As Perino ages, they increasingly resemble their father, who once said he looked like his grandfather as he aged; likeness extends outward to egrets, shells, and their home. Pictures of Birds traces a threshold where the anatomical, the ecological, and the spectral become one another between memory and dream.