Wednesday, November 8, 2006

Purcell redux

I mentioned in a recent post that local -- but internationally renowned -- art photographer (and radical curator) Rosamond Purcell has a new book out, "Bookworm." The Arlington-based essayist and lit-mag editor Sven Birkerts contributes an essay offering us ways to think about Purcell's gorgeous photos of decaying and insect/rodent-worried books (among other things), not to mention her "associative intelligence." I'm reading it this week, slowly, taking my time with each photo.

I bring up Purcell again because, earlier this week, my children and I were delighted to discover her photos of natural-history museum specimens illustrating a sharp essay on evolution in the latest issue of National Geographic.

Her three books with Stephen Jay Gould, for which she went spelunking in Harvard's natural history collections, among other places, were ahead of their time. Now that evolution has been challenged, as "just a theory," by the president himself, we're going to see many defenses of Darwin's theory. The illustrations are ready to go: Purcell has spent years figuring out how to photograph natural-history specimens in a new way, one that eschews the natural and makes you think.

UPDATE: I just noticed that, some time this morning, Slate published a slideshow-style review of Purcell's new book. Like me, the reviewer, Amanda Schaffer, argues that Purcell is both supremely un-contemporary and right up to date:

Purcell treats old objects with a sense of wonder. Her aesthetic has sometimes been described as pre-Enlightenment. Yet the work is far more contemporary than it first appears. The obsessive focus on selecting, classifying, and repurposing -- the culling of favorites from other peoples' favorites -- makes it like some ultracool group projects on the Web.

What she said!

ANOTHER UPDATE: It turns out that David Pescovitz at Boing Boing is another Purcell fan.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 07:10 PM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss