The Bird Girl

I think an entry on the Bird Girl is justified on this Blog as its imagery seems to permeate the whole of the town. In 1936 Sylvia Shaw Judson sculpted the now famous "Bird Girl" statue from bronze. One of the four commissioned sculptures stood in Savannah, Georgia in the Bonaventure Cemetery until 1994 when a photo of "The Bird Girl" appeared on the cover of the best selling novel, "Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil" by John Berendt. The statue now resides in the Telfair Museum and in no way evokes the same feelings that the statue on the cover of the book does.

The book had quite an impact on me when I read it a few years ago and the movie (directed by Clint Eastwood) solidified my interest in Savannah and the South of America. The film and no doubt the book started a landslide in tourism and the whole town seems to have prospered on the back it. The movie is a dramatized version of a true story based on the book by John Berendt that was published in 1994, it is about a wealthy art dealer’s mysterious killing of his homosexual companion and the scenes from the book i.e. Mercer House have become some of the most visited places in the city’s Historic District. I read the book a few years ago and then recently saw the movie which did an excellent job of visualising the strong scenes. portrayed in the book.

Ironically the guy that took the photo for the cover of the book [Jack Leigh] is buried at the cemetery where he took the shot 10 years before he died. His plot is quite hard to find and the kind lady who tends the cemetery museum (who put down her fillet-o-fish lunch to tell me the history of the place for 10 minutes) told me a white lie as to his whereabouts, as I stumbled across it in a completely different part of the grounds (I think I am getting a bit geeky as I didn't intend my trip to be a pilgrimage to the MITGOGAE book and film....enough said on the matter!)

More information on the book is here
Photo taken 27th Jan 07 outside Telphair Museum