Edgar Leciejewskis series 'Aves' defies the attempt to assign it to an unequivocal systematic place. Located at the intersection between art and natural science, the artists scanographs might also be found under the headword ornithology.A Perhaps we can compare them to the illustrations in eighteenth-century encyclopaedic works whose draftsmen, rather than merely recording what they actually saw, interpreted their object. With the invention of photography, science turned its back on its illustrators, thinking it now had an instrument at its disposal that let nature speak for itself, registering instead of interpreting. Leciejewski, however, flouts the expectation of objectivity people bring to this medium, leading us back to the way illustrators worked: he arranges, corrects, interprets.