Diaries of a Wet Bird: Sophia Cutino’s Ode to the Impermanence of Youth
There’s something haunting about the way youth slips away before we even realize it’s gone. It lingers in fragments—blurry photographs, a half-smoked cigarette, the golden glow of a summer that no longer exists outside of memory. Sophia Cutino knows this well. Her work is a restless pursuit of preservation, an attempt to hold on to what refuses to sit still. At 23, she releases Diaries of a Wet Bird, a collection of images that capture the fleeting nature of adolescence, the beauty and decay entangled in its fabric.
Sophia Cutino is obsessed with time. Not in a philosophical way, but in the way a collector hoards postcards from places they’ll never return to. As a kid, she stuffed pictures into scrapbooks, pressed receipts between book pages, and filled jars with rocks and shells—little talismans of moments she feared would slip through her fingers. That fear morphed into an obsession with film photography in her teenage years. And now, at 23, she releases Diaries of a Wet Bird—part fever dream, part love letter to a youth that’s already dissolving beneath her feet.
The book is an excavation of Cutino’s coming-of-age, a flickering reel of images pulled from her time in Southern California and New York. The structure is fluid, cyclical—a breath in, a breath out. The book opens with poetry and black-and-white film stills before bleeding into color, only to slip back into the fog of obscurity. Cutino stitches together fragments of existence: blurry summers, skin on asphalt, cigarette smudges, a body floating in the afternoon light. But there’s rot, too—roadkill, shrines on the side of the road, discarded relics of something once alive. The beauty of it all is that nothing stays beautiful for long.
Cutino doesn’t just capture youth—she dissects it. She worships and destroys it in the same breath. Her fascination with impermanence is deeply tied to her view on photography itself, a philosophy she carved out after devouring Susan Sontag’s On Photography. A photograph is a soft murder, and Cutino took that to heart. Photography is like taxidermy to her. It holds something still, but it also takes something away. You can never really get it back.
Her visual language is steeped in contradictions—devotion and defiance, beauty and decay, nostalgia and nihilism. Catholic iconography seeps into her work—crucifixes, candlelit shrines, white doves in mid-flight. The religious weight isn’t lost on her. She often reflects on faith and how people crave conviction. Maybe photography is her way of searching for meaning in the randomness. The book’s title echoes that sentiment. Pulled from an old Jackie Vernon joke—A wet bird never flies at night—it teeters on the edge of profundity, but ultimately means nothing. And maybe that’s the point.
There’s a delicious irony in mourning youth while still living it, and Cutino is self-aware enough to know it. She has been romanticizing her adolescence since before she was in it. The book is her way of making peace with the fact that nothing stays. Of learning how to love the moment before it’s gone. Of holding it still, just for a little while longer.
