All Sketches Wish To Be Real

All Sketches Wish to Be Real is a series of large-format cyanotype photographs of living raptors met in landscapes shaped by climate and human intervention. Made in collaboration with a raptor conservation organization, the birds are photographed in the field yet appear slightly dislocated, hovering between myth and record. The vantage points resist scientific neutrality, placing each encounter just off-axis from documentary convention. The result is recognizably real yet subtly unsettled.

The title is drawn from a poem about imagination's desire to take form, and that impulse anchors the project. Raptors operate here as both ecological indicators and charged presences, inhabiting terrain that is materially real yet historically and mythically layered.

Each photograph begins as a direct encounter and is later contact-printed by hand in cyanotype on large-scale tiled compositions of cotton paper. Seams, tonal shifts, and brush marks remain visible — the labor of looking made physical. Cyanotype's deep blue recalls the history of scientific classification, but here that lineage is redirected toward continuity rather than catalog.

All Sketches Wish to Be Real proposes that imagination is not escapism but agency — that what we give sustained attention to, we help call into form. These works are invitations: sketches with a pulse, asking to be made real.

For acquisition inquiries, contact alexandrafuller@gmail.com.

“It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, 
before the irrevocable choices. 
I am grateful for this life! 
And yet I miss the alternatives. 
All sketches wish to be real.”
— Tomas Tranströmer, The Blue House