The Pigeons Are Getting Braver

Brooklyn rooftop fliers

The pigeon is the quintessential city bird. Its presence on the sidewalk is so ordinary that we no longer see it. But on a handful of Brooklyn rooftops, the pigeon is something else entirely: a passion, an art, a competition, almost a religion.

Those who keep them call themselves fliers. They raise hundreds of birds in coops perched above the streets. Every day they feed them, clean the lofts, tend the sick and, above all, fly them.

The Pigeons Are Getting Braver is a photo-essay made between January and May 2019. I met ten of these fliers in their hidden worlds above the noise of the streets, to understand their history, their practice and their bond with the birds.

Pigeon keeping spread through New York in the mid-1950s, brought to Brooklyn and the Bronx by working-class Italian and Irish immigrants. For the past two decades, a younger generation of Hispanic and African American fliers has kept the subculture alive, with its own pleasures, rules and rites.

Today only a handful remain. The lofts are vanishing one by one, swept away by gentrification. The project is an elegiac account of a culture fading out, suspended between refuge and competition, spirituality and obsession, escape and the solitude of the rooftops.