 Birkin has published photo-essays and articles in Frieze, Cabinet, Creative Time Reports, Ibraaz, Disegno, The Harvard Advocate, and the American Civil Liberties Union blog on subjects ranging from a legally protected species of iguana roaming freely at Guantanamo Bay detention camp to Marilyn Monroe's 1945 photoshoot at an army drone factory in California.In 2010 his performance photographs won him the €25,000 Sovereign Art Prize at the Barbican Centre in London.His show "Mouths at the Invisible Event" at The Mosaic Rooms in London in 2015 was described by Hyperallergic as "a methodical examination of the language, aesthetics, and ethos of modern warfare [that] ultimately makes the emotional reality and Kafkaesque lunacy of such a system hit home".