n 1992, Elizabeth Taylor's daughter Liza Todd Tivey gave a curious package to her friend Arne Svenson, a TriBeCa photographer with a taste for photographic arcana. The small box held several dozen snapshots a fan had sent to Ms. Taylor sometime back in the 1970's. The accompanying letter had been lost, the fan's name long forgotten.
Enriching the mystery were the photographs themselves: bizarre shots of parrots and cockatoos dressed in tiny people costumes, staged in miniature theater sets with handmade props. In one, a pair of parrots on little motorcycles recreated an iconic image from "Easy Rider." In another, a cockatoo in a gold jacket posed with what was literally a baby grand piano, evoking Liberace. There were parrots playing baseball, parrots boxing, parrots portraying Bonnie and Clyde and Sonny and Cher. Parrots dressed up as Patton, Custer, Madame Butterfly and, in a strange act of cross-species cross-dressing, a parrot Mickey Mouse.
Despite the amateur quality of the sets, costumes and snapshots, it was clear someone had invested a lot of time and humor in this homemade vaudeville act. The only clues were a few photographs of a striking, dark-haired woman with an open smile and a quirky gleam in her eye.
It was the sort of identity puzzle Mr. Svenson enjoys working out. He once found a box of antique glass negatives that were evidently mug shots of 19th-century criminals. Through years of poring over old prison records and musty newspapers he was able to identify many of them and reconstruct their wayward lives.
The resulting book, "Prisoners," published in 1997, was a fascinating work of photographic sleuthing.
He is currently working with forensic sculptors, Frank Bender and Gloria Nusse, who rebuild the features of the decomposed remains of John and Jane Doe murder victims. Mr. Svenson's haunting portraits of the sculptured heads will be displayed at a Southern California art gallery, Western Project, in September.
Solving the riddle of the "bird lady" proved to be lighter going, more along the lines of Mr. Svenson's 2003 book, "Sock Monkeys," with 200 whimsical portraits of the eponymous creatures.
An Internet search led him to Woody Allen's "Broadway Danny Rose," in which that dark-haired woman and a few of her parrots appeared fleetingly among Rose's novelty acts. The credits gave her name: Alba Ballard.
It turned out that wasn't her only brush with fame. Mrs. Ballard and her feathered troupe were return guests on David Letterman's television show in the mid-1980's. Before that, in an early "Saturday Night Live" skit, Bill Murray played an NBC executive crowing about the network's new season, with the motto, "We're more fun than the other guys." As proof, he showed brief clips of shows, all featuring Mrs. Ballard's costumed parrots and cockatoos in scenes from films like "Lawrence of Arabia" and invented sitcoms like "The Pizza Guys."
Then there was an early 90's appearance on a Long Island cable show, "The Family Pet." Through that show's host, Mr. Svenson reached Mrs. Ballard's husband, Marvin, in Huntington. He learned that Mrs. Ballard had died in 1994, and that aside from the scraps he had gathered, scant evidence remained of her charmingly offbeat art.
Mr. Svenson's new book, "Mrs. Ballard's Parrots," being published this month by Harry N. Abrams, is intended to restore some luster to her flickering star. Along with reproducing those wacky snapshots, it tells her story. Her early years sound like Fellini's "La Strada." She was born Alba Spinetto near Venice in 1928, the sixth child of a variety-theater family that sang, danced and clowned as Compagnia Spinetto.
Even as a girl she showed an aptitude for training animal acts, including a baby wolf she named Bobi. Surviving years of hardship during World War II and afterward, she met Marvin Ballard, an American engineer, in Vicenza, where they married and had a son, Claudio, in 1958. They moved to the United States in 1963 and settled in Huntington, in the house where her husband and son still live.
