Audubon's Birds of America | Ross Hellman

Audubon poster © Ross Hellman 2017

Above and below Components from John James Audubon's magnificent Birds of America are reimagined in these commemorative posters by Ross Hellman, a graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa.

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Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, 1854—

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn.

Audubon poster © Ross Hellman 2017

Vaclav Havel, quoted in The New York Review of Books, January 15, 1998—

…America is an almost symbolic concentration of all the best and the worst of our civilization. On the one hand, there are its profound commitment to enhancing civil liberty and to maintaining the strength of its democratic institutions, and the fantastic developments in science and technology which have contributed so much to our well-being; on the other, there is the blind worship of perpetual economic growth and consumption, regardless of their destructive impact on the environment, or how subject they are to the dictates of materialism and consumerism, or how they, through the omnipresence of television [and the internet] and advertising, promote uniformity, and banality instead of a respect for human uniqueness.

Audubon poster © Ross Hellman 2017