In this photograph, Matthew Brandt reinjects new life into both an extinct species and one of the earliest 19th-century photographic techniques by cleverly combining the two. Inspired by Nicéphore Niépce’s heliograph process, Brandt places his negative – here an ancestor of the California Condor – against a sheet of aluminum covered in tar collected from La Brea Tar Pits. He then allows the work to sit in sunlight. The sun hardens the tar in proportion to the negative’s clear and opaque areas, resulting in an image rendered in hardened tar. Brandt’s ingenious connection of subject and medium itself is characteristic of his practice and is clearly evident in the present lot.