Intrigued by the work of photographer Rosamond Purcell, Michael sees a documentary about the 75-year-old artist, and he is moved and by the images of odd bits of nature and human-made detritus that are her mainstay. He calls Purcell the Diane Arbus of the natural world. The film comes to Lightbox Film Center in March, 2018.
Rosamond Purcell's striking photographs are about surprising transformations, the unexpected magic of metamorphosis.
Northern Masked Weaver Rosamond Purcell: Photographer of Decay Once attracted to subjects that critics considered grotesque, photographer-author Rosamond Purcell turned her attention to the old, the burnt, and the destroyed. In these objects, she finds beauty and truth. Whether it is a deceased animal, a decayed book, or an eerie specimen from a medical museum, many don’t find beauty in death or decay. We tend to be afraid of things we don’t understand. Thankfully there are a number of photographers who provide an insight into that which frightens and disturbs many. Photographers such as Joel-Peter Witkin, Kate Breakey, and Rosamond Purcell (under construction but see links below) offer visions into these worlds. Purcell is one who looks past what others may see as a monstrosity or as an item to be tossed having no value. She turns these things into serenely beautiful photographs. Her eye sees historical images and artifacts, and helps us delight in the unusual and to see connections to our own evolution. Long before wunderkammer or cabinets or curiosity became mainstream, Purcell was out there documenting these repositories full of wondrous and exotic objects. The Boston based artist is known for her portraits of decay, museum collections, and fractured found objects and is often referred to as the “doyenne of decay.” In her book, Egg & Nest, Purcell worked with the ornithological collections of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology. Here she takes close up photographs of eggs and nests, things others may toss away as meaningless. She forces us to view them in detail forcing us to see them as sublime objects, forcing us to realize their color and texture. An egg of the Red-winged Blackbird with its black markings looks like Chinese characters or nature’s calligraphy. A nest of Bullock’s Oriole looks like sticks with intertwined with colors of yarn, but it is composed primarily of pieces of plastic. One last image from this book is a detail of a Common Tailorbird nest. These birds actually sew leaves together with stitches of spider silk, caterpillar silk, and plant down. They use their bills as needles. Purcell takes the time to focus on the intricacy of the nests and the perfection of the bird eggs. A blue egg photographed alone becomes a blue planet and together look like eggs from an Easter basket. A Woodpecker’s nest resembles a wooden shoe. Yes these nests are marvels of natural history and Purcell turns them into objects of art. "Purcell is fixed....on the state of decay. This bent is evident in her exceptional new volume, Bookworm, which recasts mangled texts as works of art." .....David Pescovitz, Slate Online, November 9, 2006 Purcell’s next book of photographs is called Bookworm. For most of us books are here to convey information, not many see the beauty in a decayed worm-eaten tome. When books decay and are invaded by mold and insects, Purcell sees them as objects that convey a different sort of information, beauty in burned, molded, the shredded, and the mildewed. She teaches us to read differently and to see beauty in the not so pretty. In this first retrospective of her work we see a 19th century French economics text re-interpreted by foraging termites and books burned beyond recognition. They may be filled with foraging termites and burned black, but she photographs them to put forth a new type of information, an appreciation for deterioration and purification. She photographs books as if they are the last remnants of civilization. Foucalt's Pendulum, paperback book eaten by termites in Bali. Photograph, 1996. Dante’s Inferno. Burned and found on the street outside the University of Massachusetts. These are books as they were not meant to be. These photos may be more interesting than the text, some almost taking on the look of a handmade book or a pulled print. Some of the books have become nests for creatures that have passed on, with their skeletons embedded into the book’s pages. Bookworm's reproductions are imaginative evidence of those processes that render literal meaning irrelevant. Purcell is fixated on finding beauty and the exquisite in what she photographs, but her eyes see these differently than many of us do. She makes us question, what is a beauty, what is a monster? Can we find and see the exquisite as she does? As with the photographer Witkin, some of her subjects may be physically “damaged” but she still sees intelligence and alluring qualities that make them captivating to the viewer. In her book, Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters, Purcell explores the differences in us. She has taken photographs at natural history and anatomical museums, has used models of her own creation, and used artwork from numerous private and public collections. With her photographs she delves in subjects such as dwarves, giants, conjoined twins, hairy people, albinos, and humans with animal heads. One of her photos shops a hydrocephalic child where the skull has opened. Horrifying, no. Instead Purcell’s photograph of this subject shows how the skull appears to have opened like the petals of a flower. The passion for collecting is a full time job, an obsession. All collectors seem to have one thing in common, they believe passionately in what they collect. In the book Finders, Keepers, Eight Collectors, Purcell teams up with paleontologist Stephen Gould to look at this collecting obsession. Together they look at collections that span 300 years from the monarch Peter the Great to the wealthy Lord Rothschild, collections from a blind ornithologist van Wickevoort-Crommelin to amateurs and their fossil finds. In the photographer's afterword from the book she says, "She is intrigued by the relationship of collectors or curators to their collections, in short the grey area between a rational scientific system and human idiosyncrasies." She has found whether a private instruction or a person living in the country collecting what they find of interest, both have a instinct to arrange them systematically to they can find them and try to make sense of them. Below are some photographs from the book. Again, many find these to be disturbing, but Purcell photographs them in a way to make them strangely compelling. Maybe we find them compelling because they are things we do not see everyday. Albino Bird of Paradise Naturalist Willem Cornelis van Heurn's Frogs in Jars and other Miscellani Arm holding an eye socket, Collection Albinus, Leiden On her way to Owls Head Lighthouse in Maine, she came across a piece of property that was once an antique shop. William Buckminster owns the property and became the subject of her book Owls Head. His property is 11 acres packed with stuff. She found many many decayed objects including a massive collection wooden lobster buoys, scrap metal and wooden windows all heaped together. garbage Broken clocks, an old typewriter, birdhouses, ruined chandeliers, moldy books all in piles were dug through and photographed in black and white. You'll have to read the book to discover what Buckminster's most prized possession. A rusted old typewriter from Owls Head 'Owls Head,' She Finds Art in the Overlooked. Listen to NPR interview Whatever Purcell photographs she takes the mundane and recasts it as an extraordinary object. Photographer Rosamond Purcell explains her process working with scholar Michael Witmore to create the unique images seen in the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition, "Very Like a Whale." For more information, Very Much Like a Whale. “Till That Her Garments.” Photograph by Rosamond Purcell From the Folger Shakespeare Library Some links to information about the world of Rosamond Purcell An interview with Purcell at Bostonia A review of her work at the Boston Review "Doyenne of decay" Her Photographs illustrate a National Geographic article Books by Purcell
Some years ago, I recall seeing mention of photographer Rosamund Purcell teaching a Zone VI workshop. Zone VI was the brand name for a view camera equipment marketing outfit--the brainchild of a photographer named Fred Picker--which sold cameras and tripods and other accessories, mostly by mail order, in the 1980's and '90's. Some of the equipment was good, but not everyone was satisfied with the merchandise. Picker was a big promoter of his own photographic work and his product line. With the decline and impending demise of straight silver process photography, Picker's business fell on hard times. He died in 2002 after a long battle with kidney disease. But Picker isn't the subject of this blog. Rosamond Purcell [1942- ] has become widely known through her publications, including among others Illuminations [1986, a collaboration with the late Stephen Jay Gould]; and Owl's Head [2004], and most recently, Bookworm. Purcell's work has focused primarily on the artifacts of natural history, as a starting point, and over the last several years, on the vivid and immediate visual properties of organic decay. Preservation and disintegration, as metaphors for meaning in photographic imagery. Purcell isn't the only one exploring this kind of imagery, but she's done as much of it, and with more penetration, than anyone else I can think of. Her work has obvious affinities with--for instance--the boxes of Joseph Cornell. Her photographic images often seem like dense arrangements of rotting matter, odd paraphernalia, curios, keepsakes, found objects,--the detritus of gratuitous potlatch--in various states of unkempt decay or breakdown into constituent components through oxidation, consumption by pests, degradation by fire, dampness, pressure, the ravages of time and flux. That ordinary objects may hold the evidence of all this energetic use, on the one hand, or of their abandonment and neglect, on the other, is one of the truisms of her art. Bookworm [2006] is devoted to an exploration of the minutely recorded evidence of the decay of written or recorded matter--or books--or other related surfaces which exhibit the fragmented or riddled traces of their original form. The bookworm becomes a philosophical key to the 125 color images in the book--bookworms literally eat their way through books, putting holes in them, like cheese. But of course, there are many forms of decay. Our culture's latest disregard for the inherent values of the material text, at the dawn of the Age of Information (or Computer Age), is reason enough to be interested in the preservation of books as repositories of knowledge and information. But preservation in this general sense is not Purcell's subject. She's not simply writing an elegy to the book as cultural artifact; she's exploring the visual field of that disintegration for clues and qualities which can transcend the mere concern for its loss--as, literally, unsuspected aesthetic values, finding meaning in the entropic slump of matter, oppressed by the weight of our desire and frustration and neglect, the material consequence of the inertia of intent which our civilization has built up, over centuries. Caches of such detritus are everywhere, one has only to look beyond the shopping centers and freeway overpasses to discover the neglected, rejected, strewn, cast-off, forgotten, abandoned, lost, hidden, used-up, thrown-away, scattered, buried, stashed, saved, deconstructed and appraised stuff--lying everywhere about us on this grizzled, ancient planet we call home. Purcell is a collector, and the more complex, dense and churned the things she finds are, the more she is fascinated and drawn to them. The spaces we inhabit in our imaginations--in our dreams, or our speculations about the structure of memory, or of our thought and sensation--may be expressed by the piecemeal disintegration of physical matter, the valence of which follows predictable and inevitable laws of process. Our familiar tendency in the presence of the weight and strata of decay is to experience fear, revulsion, dismissal. But we know that decay, oxidation, compression, dispersal are in fact the harbingers of renewal, of the process of the restoration of stasis, fertile ground for the cycles of re-use, the eternal plant. Decay, invasive corruption and consumption penetrate and eat away at the edges of intention, desire, feeding a hunger that has no name. There is a beauty in the implosions of matter, the vivid transformation, chemical, fragmented, delicate screens of digest(ion), riddled, organic, bitter and sweet, obdurate and fragile. The disintegrating vestiges of surface-meaning challenge our notions of use, cause our conceptions of the value of such surfaces to undergo a relentless intellectual composting. Purcell notices that photography, the momentary and impulsive fixing of such surfaces through the poised, controlled exposure, can preserve moments of this process. In the campaign of her documentation, richly grained and evocative, the foamy churning of digested matter becomes lush, hypnotic and weird. Is sour the desire of sugar? Do we salvage to sing? Sacrifice excess lots to crunch skeletons of structure? The material text burned onto tablets of sand, glass lens interpolating distortions of the known. As we lose these masses, flickers of light illuminate the pyramid of resistance, what endures in the circus of chaotic species. Climax decay. The deconstruction of disabled formal artifacts suggests abstraction. Meaning gathers around nodes of familiar keys, echoes, clues. But these are all familiar fragments. Within the span of cultural memory, we're on solid ground. But nothing could be less confirming. The orgasm of progress stockpiles products of excess labor. The mind window-shops for stuffed mannikins of abandoned weaves, plastic body parts. Connoisseurs of industrial detritus. Symbiotic companions contract out parasitic eyeless wormlike hoards jiggling through the logarithm of rising fizz. In my earlier posts on Irving Penn and Frederick Sommer, I explored the metaphorical implications of the use of light-sensitive surfaces to bear the self-reflexive relationship between viewer and object, eye and subject. Light is a medium, but it is also a component of matter itself--perhaps, as physicists now believe, the very stuff of matter itself. Light is not only the transmitter of data (of meaning), but also--in its other manifestation as "arrested light" the sensitive surface itself--matter talking to itself. And that is a conversation we sometimes may seem to be overhearing. Some such sense of the overheard seems to be taking place in Purcell's elegant color prints. Carpe diem. In seizing the momentary evidence of the degraded artifacts of our ambitious culture of production, Purcell is holding time to account, demanding of our impatient circumambient distraction, that we pay heed. There's a lush permission about these images in Bookworm, as if we had tunneled into the Pharaoh's tomb, and held the brittle papyrus scroll in our quivering fingers. Our fortunes may be read from just such fleeting formulae. We are shadows and ghosts. The evidence of our having existed, pales in significance to the grander panorama of geologic time. The overwhelming materiality of the quotidian masquerades as random thought, but animation may simply be a projection of a mindless consumption. Form is used up in a circle drawn by the fixed idea. The orbit of anxiety is constantly decaying. Language might decompose at the same rate as attention. We race entropy to the finish line. Rosamund Purcell
Rosamond Purcell, Wunderkammer-keeper and amazing photographer of curiosities and collections, contributed a short piece to McSweeney's that's tied to her latest book, Egg & Nest. The marvelous book couples Purcell's…
Photographer Rosamond Purcell's new book, Owls Head, is about her 20-year friendship with William Buckminster, an eccentric collector whose dilapidated antiques shop and 11-acre junkyard in Maine became something of a tourist attraction. Buckminster sold many of his items to Purcell, who took them home and photographed them in large-format Polaroids. Rosamond, who's been called the "doyenne of decay," also collaborated three times on books with the late paleontologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould.
Graham Shearing to speak on “Curiosities for the Collector;” special show and fundraiser scheduled at Millvale gallery for Maxo Vanka murals.
A vast assortment of beautiful but bizarre objects relating to nineteenth-century life sciences takes centre stage at Manchester Museum Each of the finely crafted yet uncanny objects in Manchester Museum’s Objects Lesson exhibition was created for the purpose of understanding the...
Northern Masked Weaver Rosamond Purcell: Photographer of Decay Once attracted to subjects that critics considered grotesque, photographer-author Rosamond Purcell turned her attention to the old, the burnt, and the destroyed. In these objects, she finds beauty and truth. Whether it is a deceased animal, a decayed book, or an eerie specimen from a medical museum, many don’t find beauty in death or decay. We tend to be afraid of things we don’t understand. Thankfully there are a number of photographers who provide an insight into that which frightens and disturbs many. Photographers such as Joel-Peter Witkin, Kate Breakey, and Rosamond Purcell (under construction but see links below) offer visions into these worlds. Purcell is one who looks past what others may see as a monstrosity or as an item to be tossed having no value. She turns these things into serenely beautiful photographs. Her eye sees historical images and artifacts, and helps us delight in the unusual and to see connections to our own evolution. Long before wunderkammer or cabinets or curiosity became mainstream, Purcell was out there documenting these repositories full of wondrous and exotic objects. The Boston based artist is known for her portraits of decay, museum collections, and fractured found objects and is often referred to as the “doyenne of decay.” In her book, Egg & Nest, Purcell worked with the ornithological collections of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology. Here she takes close up photographs of eggs and nests, things others may toss away as meaningless. She forces us to view them in detail forcing us to see them as sublime objects, forcing us to realize their color and texture. An egg of the Red-winged Blackbird with its black markings looks like Chinese characters or nature’s calligraphy. A nest of Bullock’s Oriole looks like sticks with intertwined with colors of yarn, but it is composed primarily of pieces of plastic. One last image from this book is a detail of a Common Tailorbird nest. These birds actually sew leaves together with stitches of spider silk, caterpillar silk, and plant down. They use their bills as needles. Purcell takes the time to focus on the intricacy of the nests and the perfection of the bird eggs. A blue egg photographed alone becomes a blue planet and together look like eggs from an Easter basket. A Woodpecker’s nest resembles a wooden shoe. Yes these nests are marvels of natural history and Purcell turns them into objects of art. "Purcell is fixed....on the state of decay. This bent is evident in her exceptional new volume, Bookworm, which recasts mangled texts as works of art." .....David Pescovitz, Slate Online, November 9, 2006 Purcell’s next book of photographs is called Bookworm. For most of us books are here to convey information, not many see the beauty in a decayed worm-eaten tome. When books decay and are invaded by mold and insects, Purcell sees them as objects that convey a different sort of information, beauty in burned, molded, the shredded, and the mildewed. She teaches us to read differently and to see beauty in the not so pretty. In this first retrospective of her work we see a 19th century French economics text re-interpreted by foraging termites and books burned beyond recognition. They may be filled with foraging termites and burned black, but she photographs them to put forth a new type of information, an appreciation for deterioration and purification. She photographs books as if they are the last remnants of civilization. Foucalt's Pendulum, paperback book eaten by termites in Bali. Photograph, 1996. Dante’s Inferno. Burned and found on the street outside the University of Massachusetts. These are books as they were not meant to be. These photos may be more interesting than the text, some almost taking on the look of a handmade book or a pulled print. Some of the books have become nests for creatures that have passed on, with their skeletons embedded into the book’s pages. Bookworm's reproductions are imaginative evidence of those processes that render literal meaning irrelevant. Purcell is fixated on finding beauty and the exquisite in what she photographs, but her eyes see these differently than many of us do. She makes us question, what is a beauty, what is a monster? Can we find and see the exquisite as she does? As with the photographer Witkin, some of her subjects may be physically “damaged” but she still sees intelligence and alluring qualities that make them captivating to the viewer. In her book, Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters, Purcell explores the differences in us. She has taken photographs at natural history and anatomical museums, has used models of her own creation, and used artwork from numerous private and public collections. With her photographs she delves in subjects such as dwarves, giants, conjoined twins, hairy people, albinos, and humans with animal heads. One of her photos shops a hydrocephalic child where the skull has opened. Horrifying, no. Instead Purcell’s photograph of this subject shows how the skull appears to have opened like the petals of a flower. The passion for collecting is a full time job, an obsession. All collectors seem to have one thing in common, they believe passionately in what they collect. In the book Finders, Keepers, Eight Collectors, Purcell teams up with paleontologist Stephen Gould to look at this collecting obsession. Together they look at collections that span 300 years from the monarch Peter the Great to the wealthy Lord Rothschild, collections from a blind ornithologist van Wickevoort-Crommelin to amateurs and their fossil finds. In the photographer's afterword from the book she says, "She is intrigued by the relationship of collectors or curators to their collections, in short the grey area between a rational scientific system and human idiosyncrasies." She has found whether a private instruction or a person living in the country collecting what they find of interest, both have a instinct to arrange them systematically to they can find them and try to make sense of them. Below are some photographs from the book. Again, many find these to be disturbing, but Purcell photographs them in a way to make them strangely compelling. Maybe we find them compelling because they are things we do not see everyday. Albino Bird of Paradise Naturalist Willem Cornelis van Heurn's Frogs in Jars and other Miscellani Arm holding an eye socket, Collection Albinus, Leiden On her way to Owls Head Lighthouse in Maine, she came across a piece of property that was once an antique shop. William Buckminster owns the property and became the subject of her book Owls Head. His property is 11 acres packed with stuff. She found many many decayed objects including a massive collection wooden lobster buoys, scrap metal and wooden windows all heaped together. garbage Broken clocks, an old typewriter, birdhouses, ruined chandeliers, moldy books all in piles were dug through and photographed in black and white. You'll have to read the book to discover what Buckminster's most prized possession. A rusted old typewriter from Owls Head 'Owls Head,' She Finds Art in the Overlooked. Listen to NPR interview Whatever Purcell photographs she takes the mundane and recasts it as an extraordinary object. Photographer Rosamond Purcell explains her process working with scholar Michael Witmore to create the unique images seen in the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition, "Very Like a Whale." For more information, Very Much Like a Whale. “Till That Her Garments.” Photograph by Rosamond Purcell From the Folger Shakespeare Library Some links to information about the world of Rosamond Purcell An interview with Purcell at Bostonia A review of her work at the Boston Review "Doyenne of decay" Her Photographs illustrate a National Geographic article Books by Purcell
Northern Masked Weaver Rosamond Purcell: Photographer of Decay Once attracted to subjects that critics considered grotesque, photographer-author Rosamond Purcell turned her attention to the old, the burnt, and the destroyed. In these objects, she finds beauty and truth. Whether it is a deceased animal, a decayed book, or an eerie specimen from a medical museum, many don’t find beauty in death or decay. We tend to be afraid of things we don’t understand. Thankfully there are a number of photographers who provide an insight into that which frightens and disturbs many. Photographers such as Joel-Peter Witkin, Kate Breakey, and Rosamond Purcell (under construction but see links below) offer visions into these worlds. Purcell is one who looks past what others may see as a monstrosity or as an item to be tossed having no value. She turns these things into serenely beautiful photographs. Her eye sees historical images and artifacts, and helps us delight in the unusual and to see connections to our own evolution. Long before wunderkammer or cabinets or curiosity became mainstream, Purcell was out there documenting these repositories full of wondrous and exotic objects. The Boston based artist is known for her portraits of decay, museum collections, and fractured found objects and is often referred to as the “doyenne of decay.” In her book, Egg & Nest, Purcell worked with the ornithological collections of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology. Here she takes close up photographs of eggs and nests, things others may toss away as meaningless. She forces us to view them in detail forcing us to see them as sublime objects, forcing us to realize their color and texture. An egg of the Red-winged Blackbird with its black markings looks like Chinese characters or nature’s calligraphy. A nest of Bullock’s Oriole looks like sticks with intertwined with colors of yarn, but it is composed primarily of pieces of plastic. One last image from this book is a detail of a Common Tailorbird nest. These birds actually sew leaves together with stitches of spider silk, caterpillar silk, and plant down. They use their bills as needles. Purcell takes the time to focus on the intricacy of the nests and the perfection of the bird eggs. A blue egg photographed alone becomes a blue planet and together look like eggs from an Easter basket. A Woodpecker’s nest resembles a wooden shoe. Yes these nests are marvels of natural history and Purcell turns them into objects of art. "Purcell is fixed....on the state of decay. This bent is evident in her exceptional new volume, Bookworm, which recasts mangled texts as works of art." .....David Pescovitz, Slate Online, November 9, 2006 Purcell’s next book of photographs is called Bookworm. For most of us books are here to convey information, not many see the beauty in a decayed worm-eaten tome. When books decay and are invaded by mold and insects, Purcell sees them as objects that convey a different sort of information, beauty in burned, molded, the shredded, and the mildewed. She teaches us to read differently and to see beauty in the not so pretty. In this first retrospective of her work we see a 19th century French economics text re-interpreted by foraging termites and books burned beyond recognition. They may be filled with foraging termites and burned black, but she photographs them to put forth a new type of information, an appreciation for deterioration and purification. She photographs books as if they are the last remnants of civilization. Foucalt's Pendulum, paperback book eaten by termites in Bali. Photograph, 1996. Dante’s Inferno. Burned and found on the street outside the University of Massachusetts. These are books as they were not meant to be. These photos may be more interesting than the text, some almost taking on the look of a handmade book or a pulled print. Some of the books have become nests for creatures that have passed on, with their skeletons embedded into the book’s pages. Bookworm's reproductions are imaginative evidence of those processes that render literal meaning irrelevant. Purcell is fixated on finding beauty and the exquisite in what she photographs, but her eyes see these differently than many of us do. She makes us question, what is a beauty, what is a monster? Can we find and see the exquisite as she does? As with the photographer Witkin, some of her subjects may be physically “damaged” but she still sees intelligence and alluring qualities that make them captivating to the viewer. In her book, Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters, Purcell explores the differences in us. She has taken photographs at natural history and anatomical museums, has used models of her own creation, and used artwork from numerous private and public collections. With her photographs she delves in subjects such as dwarves, giants, conjoined twins, hairy people, albinos, and humans with animal heads. One of her photos shops a hydrocephalic child where the skull has opened. Horrifying, no. Instead Purcell’s photograph of this subject shows how the skull appears to have opened like the petals of a flower. The passion for collecting is a full time job, an obsession. All collectors seem to have one thing in common, they believe passionately in what they collect. In the book Finders, Keepers, Eight Collectors, Purcell teams up with paleontologist Stephen Gould to look at this collecting obsession. Together they look at collections that span 300 years from the monarch Peter the Great to the wealthy Lord Rothschild, collections from a blind ornithologist van Wickevoort-Crommelin to amateurs and their fossil finds. In the photographer's afterword from the book she says, "She is intrigued by the relationship of collectors or curators to their collections, in short the grey area between a rational scientific system and human idiosyncrasies." She has found whether a private instruction or a person living in the country collecting what they find of interest, both have a instinct to arrange them systematically to they can find them and try to make sense of them. Below are some photographs from the book. Again, many find these to be disturbing, but Purcell photographs them in a way to make them strangely compelling. Maybe we find them compelling because they are things we do not see everyday. Albino Bird of Paradise Naturalist Willem Cornelis van Heurn's Frogs in Jars and other Miscellani Arm holding an eye socket, Collection Albinus, Leiden On her way to Owls Head Lighthouse in Maine, she came across a piece of property that was once an antique shop. William Buckminster owns the property and became the subject of her book Owls Head. His property is 11 acres packed with stuff. She found many many decayed objects including a massive collection wooden lobster buoys, scrap metal and wooden windows all heaped together. garbage Broken clocks, an old typewriter, birdhouses, ruined chandeliers, moldy books all in piles were dug through and photographed in black and white. You'll have to read the book to discover what Buckminster's most prized possession. A rusted old typewriter from Owls Head 'Owls Head,' She Finds Art in the Overlooked. Listen to NPR interview Whatever Purcell photographs she takes the mundane and recasts it as an extraordinary object. Photographer Rosamond Purcell explains her process working with scholar Michael Witmore to create the unique images seen in the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition, "Very Like a Whale." For more information, Very Much Like a Whale. “Till That Her Garments.” Photograph by Rosamond Purcell From the Folger Shakespeare Library Some links to information about the world of Rosamond Purcell An interview with Purcell at Bostonia A review of her work at the Boston Review "Doyenne of decay" Her Photographs illustrate a National Geographic article Books by Purcell
The talented Andy Paiko a few years back he was comissioned by D.L. & Co. to make an Absinithe Fountain. His current body of work is influenced by Cabinets of Curiosity! A full-size recreation of 17th Century naturalist Olaus Worm’s Wunderkammer by artist Rosamond Purcell Photo of Pop Surrealist, Mark Ryden in his studio.
Some years ago, I recall seeing mention of photographer Rosamund Purcell teaching a Zone VI workshop. Zone VI was the brand name for a view camera equipment marketing outfit--the brainchild of a photographer named Fred Picker--which sold cameras and tripods and other accessories, mostly by mail order, in the 1980's and '90's. Some of the equipment was good, but not everyone was satisfied with the merchandise. Picker was a big promoter of his own photographic work and his product line. With the decline and impending demise of straight silver process photography, Picker's business fell on hard times. He died in 2002 after a long battle with kidney disease. But Picker isn't the subject of this blog. Rosamond Purcell [1942- ] has become widely known through her publications, including among others Illuminations [1986, a collaboration with the late Stephen Jay Gould]; and Owl's Head [2004], and most recently, Bookworm. Purcell's work has focused primarily on the artifacts of natural history, as a starting point, and over the last several years, on the vivid and immediate visual properties of organic decay. Preservation and disintegration, as metaphors for meaning in photographic imagery. Purcell isn't the only one exploring this kind of imagery, but she's done as much of it, and with more penetration, than anyone else I can think of. Her work has obvious affinities with--for instance--the boxes of Joseph Cornell. Her photographic images often seem like dense arrangements of rotting matter, odd paraphernalia, curios, keepsakes, found objects,--the detritus of gratuitous potlatch--in various states of unkempt decay or breakdown into constituent components through oxidation, consumption by pests, degradation by fire, dampness, pressure, the ravages of time and flux. That ordinary objects may hold the evidence of all this energetic use, on the one hand, or of their abandonment and neglect, on the other, is one of the truisms of her art. Bookworm [2006] is devoted to an exploration of the minutely recorded evidence of the decay of written or recorded matter--or books--or other related surfaces which exhibit the fragmented or riddled traces of their original form. The bookworm becomes a philosophical key to the 125 color images in the book--bookworms literally eat their way through books, putting holes in them, like cheese. But of course, there are many forms of decay. Our culture's latest disregard for the inherent values of the material text, at the dawn of the Age of Information (or Computer Age), is reason enough to be interested in the preservation of books as repositories of knowledge and information. But preservation in this general sense is not Purcell's subject. She's not simply writing an elegy to the book as cultural artifact; she's exploring the visual field of that disintegration for clues and qualities which can transcend the mere concern for its loss--as, literally, unsuspected aesthetic values, finding meaning in the entropic slump of matter, oppressed by the weight of our desire and frustration and neglect, the material consequence of the inertia of intent which our civilization has built up, over centuries. Caches of such detritus are everywhere, one has only to look beyond the shopping centers and freeway overpasses to discover the neglected, rejected, strewn, cast-off, forgotten, abandoned, lost, hidden, used-up, thrown-away, scattered, buried, stashed, saved, deconstructed and appraised stuff--lying everywhere about us on this grizzled, ancient planet we call home. Purcell is a collector, and the more complex, dense and churned the things she finds are, the more she is fascinated and drawn to them. The spaces we inhabit in our imaginations--in our dreams, or our speculations about the structure of memory, or of our thought and sensation--may be expressed by the piecemeal disintegration of physical matter, the valence of which follows predictable and inevitable laws of process. Our familiar tendency in the presence of the weight and strata of decay is to experience fear, revulsion, dismissal. But we know that decay, oxidation, compression, dispersal are in fact the harbingers of renewal, of the process of the restoration of stasis, fertile ground for the cycles of re-use, the eternal plant. Decay, invasive corruption and consumption penetrate and eat away at the edges of intention, desire, feeding a hunger that has no name. There is a beauty in the implosions of matter, the vivid transformation, chemical, fragmented, delicate screens of digest(ion), riddled, organic, bitter and sweet, obdurate and fragile. The disintegrating vestiges of surface-meaning challenge our notions of use, cause our conceptions of the value of such surfaces to undergo a relentless intellectual composting. Purcell notices that photography, the momentary and impulsive fixing of such surfaces through the poised, controlled exposure, can preserve moments of this process. In the campaign of her documentation, richly grained and evocative, the foamy churning of digested matter becomes lush, hypnotic and weird. Is sour the desire of sugar? Do we salvage to sing? Sacrifice excess lots to crunch skeletons of structure? The material text burned onto tablets of sand, glass lens interpolating distortions of the known. As we lose these masses, flickers of light illuminate the pyramid of resistance, what endures in the circus of chaotic species. Climax decay. The deconstruction of disabled formal artifacts suggests abstraction. Meaning gathers around nodes of familiar keys, echoes, clues. But these are all familiar fragments. Within the span of cultural memory, we're on solid ground. But nothing could be less confirming. The orgasm of progress stockpiles products of excess labor. The mind window-shops for stuffed mannikins of abandoned weaves, plastic body parts. Connoisseurs of industrial detritus. Symbiotic companions contract out parasitic eyeless wormlike hoards jiggling through the logarithm of rising fizz. In my earlier posts on Irving Penn and Frederick Sommer, I explored the metaphorical implications of the use of light-sensitive surfaces to bear the self-reflexive relationship between viewer and object, eye and subject. Light is a medium, but it is also a component of matter itself--perhaps, as physicists now believe, the very stuff of matter itself. Light is not only the transmitter of data (of meaning), but also--in its other manifestation as "arrested light" the sensitive surface itself--matter talking to itself. And that is a conversation we sometimes may seem to be overhearing. Some such sense of the overheard seems to be taking place in Purcell's elegant color prints. Carpe diem. In seizing the momentary evidence of the degraded artifacts of our ambitious culture of production, Purcell is holding time to account, demanding of our impatient circumambient distraction, that we pay heed. There's a lush permission about these images in Bookworm, as if we had tunneled into the Pharaoh's tomb, and held the brittle papyrus scroll in our quivering fingers. Our fortunes may be read from just such fleeting formulae. We are shadows and ghosts. The evidence of our having existed, pales in significance to the grander panorama of geologic time. The overwhelming materiality of the quotidian masquerades as random thought, but animation may simply be a projection of a mindless consumption. Form is used up in a circle drawn by the fixed idea. The orbit of anxiety is constantly decaying. Language might decompose at the same rate as attention. We race entropy to the finish line. Rosamund Purcell
[...] Che si tratti di un retaggio del passato di cacciatori-raccoglitori, o del bisogno di creare ordine nel caos, oppure del semplice desiderio di tenere per sé qualcuno o qualcosa, la sete di possesso è un segno distintivo della psiche umana. Ma si rischia la patologia. Colo
Rosamond Wolff Purcell photographs collections of dusty, forgotten objects in such a way that the subject transcends its original identity – a bat preserved in glycerine, a corroded typewriter, a pile of dog skins – to be reinterpreted as a metaphorical, emotional, aesthetically intriguing work of art. She investigates the stripping away of meaning, as well as the additional layers of meaning that arise when an object is removed from its original context and inserted into an alien environment. "Alizarin-stained Shark" (preserved in glycerine, on parchment, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) Purcell has explored the basements and attics of natural history museums, celebrated the cabinet of curiosities of Peter the Great, illuminated the mouldering debris of a strange junkyard in Maine, and faced the glassy gaze of the animals mankind has driven to extinction. With the cooperation of curators of curiosities and monsters like the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Mütter Museum, and in collaboration with experts like paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and natural historian Stephen Jay Gould and sleight-of-hand master and dice collector Ricky Jay, Purcell has spent her career exploring the intersection between art and science and the sometimes beautiful effects of mutation and decay. "Viper" (with bird preserved in alcohol, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) In 1987's Illuminations: A Bestiary, Purcell wrote, "As a photographer I am attracted to zoological collections by virtue of their fragmentary state. Partially eroded or effaced surfaces appeal to me, as would an ancient piece of fresco, a piece of Egyptian linen with faint hallmarks, a piece of text eaten by termites. In these collections, ranging in time between 1650 and 1979, one can find effects parallel to the visual delights inherent in the worn surfaces of human artifacts... The creatures you see were chosen for their visual eloquence and metaphorical suggestiveness." "Night Monkey" (preserved in glycerine, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "Albino Bird of Paradise" (from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) "I am intrigued by traditional museum conceits – classification, juxtaposition of words and objects, the relationship of the collectors and curators to their collections – in short, the grey area between a rational scientific system and human idiosyncrasies. Private and institutional collectors share the same instinctive hunger – to seek, to find, to classify." (from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) "Lobodon" (Bumpy-toothed seal skull, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "I've heard of a man in the deep country who has collected furniture, clothes, paper, and arranged them systematically (by class of object) along the road and through a field. He visits his collection daily, checking, sorting, talking, handling every part to be certain nothing is out of place, nothing goes awry. No conscientious collection manager in a big city museum would do otherwise." (from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) "Typewriter" (from Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things) "Owls from the collection of a blind ornithologist" (from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) "In photographing a mastodon tooth, I chose to kneel down and look up at it set against a cotton sunscreen, because it reminded me of a mountain range. I showed the photograph to the manager of the collection saying, "a real landscape!" He replied with considerable distress, "it's a tooth." Between the scientific name and the visual experience lies the abyss: the laws of classification, artistic license versus scientific certainty, and, most treacherous, the desire to look for metaphor in territory thoroughly mapped by rational minds." (from "The Name of the Game," Art Bulletin, 6/1/95) "Bat" (mouse-tailed bat preserved in glycerine, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "Whatever the technical difficulties of photographing an object through glass, they become insignificant when transparent and translucent surfaces permit a veritable lexicon of illusion. Preservative liquids of various viscosities contrive to grant subjects unexpected depths, faint or dramatic reflections, absent, displaced, or exaggerated detail, and sometimes a selectively mirrored surface which allows a whole room, a window or a courtyard to cross over and present itself head-on in the same plane as the subject, expanding the sense of place and bringing relief to what might otherwise seem an obsessively myopic or clinical view of objects not traditionally considered "artistic" in nature." (from "The Name of the Game," Art Bulletin, 6/1/95) "Chameleon" (preserved in glycerine, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "In the domains of the scientist and curator, the death of an organism is the beginning; it strips away the layer of life. Other layers of information may then vanish with each stage of dissection – the skin from the bone; the bones from the skin; color or opacity from the tissue; or fluids from the vital organs, arteries and veins. Irrelevant layers are discarded as the scientist seeks a proper vantage point for his work... What the viewer to the collections sees then is always partial, sometimes vestigial, and to the nonscientist, often mysterious." (from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "European Moles" (pressed skins, from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) While sifting through dozens of important and venerable collections, Purcell has pondered the drive to collect and classify, often placing the collector himself under the microscope via analysis of his obsessions. "The boxes and boxes of van Heurn's somewhat macabre, perfectly pressed skins of rabbits, rats, dogs, cats, pigs and moles, coupled with his ideas about order and taxonomy, caught my attention long ago. He seemed to me to be a kind of "black hole" collector, insatiable and a bit out of control. He had to have it all." (from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) "Rats in envelope" (repurposed envelope, from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) Yet during her explorations of what remains of the world's wunderkammer, Purcell was bitten by the collecting bug herself. She became fascinated by the collection of Ole Worm, a 17th-century Danish archaeologist, embryologist, natural philosopher, physician, and teacher, and eventually attempted to recreate his cabinet of curiosities as a museum exhibition. As a student of decay, Purcell has hauled tons of corroded metal and mouldering paper home from a junkyard in Maine, almost inadvertently creating her own personal museum in which to highlight the more intriguing objects she unearthed. The images here are just a small sample from a couple of Rosamond Purcell's best-known works. Others include Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet, Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals, and Bookworm. Rosamond Purcell's latest book, Egg & Nest, just came off the presses. In his review, documentarian Errol Morris wrote, "In this collection of eggs and nests made of random bric-a-brac, cassette tape, and wire, we're invited to meditate on oology as ontology, ontology as oology, and the paradox of museums as a lifeless record of life. Rosamond Purcell has magnificently returned to her most fascinating obsession, the repurposing of life as the purpose of life." "Alizarin-stained Fish" (preserved in glycerine, on parchment, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth." – Henry Miller
Some years ago, I recall seeing mention of photographer Rosamund Purcell teaching a Zone VI workshop. Zone VI was the brand name for a vie...
Sample art from Bookworm, a collection of photos and collages of books destroyed by nature.
Museums are often as interesting in their modes of organizing and collecting as the objects they collect themselves, reflecting a universal fascination with...
Some years ago, I recall seeing mention of photographer Rosamund Purcell teaching a Zone VI workshop. Zone VI was the brand name for a view camera equipment marketing outfit--the brainchild of a photographer named Fred Picker--which sold cameras and tripods and other accessories, mostly by mail order, in the 1980's and '90's. Some of the equipment was good, but not everyone was satisfied with the merchandise. Picker was a big promoter of his own photographic work and his product line. With the decline and impending demise of straight silver process photography, Picker's business fell on hard times. He died in 2002 after a long battle with kidney disease. But Picker isn't the subject of this blog. Rosamond Purcell [1942- ] has become widely known through her publications, including among others Illuminations [1986, a collaboration with the late Stephen Jay Gould]; and Owl's Head [2004], and most recently, Bookworm. Purcell's work has focused primarily on the artifacts of natural history, as a starting point, and over the last several years, on the vivid and immediate visual properties of organic decay. Preservation and disintegration, as metaphors for meaning in photographic imagery. Purcell isn't the only one exploring this kind of imagery, but she's done as much of it, and with more penetration, than anyone else I can think of. Her work has obvious affinities with--for instance--the boxes of Joseph Cornell. Her photographic images often seem like dense arrangements of rotting matter, odd paraphernalia, curios, keepsakes, found objects,--the detritus of gratuitous potlatch--in various states of unkempt decay or breakdown into constituent components through oxidation, consumption by pests, degradation by fire, dampness, pressure, the ravages of time and flux. That ordinary objects may hold the evidence of all this energetic use, on the one hand, or of their abandonment and neglect, on the other, is one of the truisms of her art. Bookworm [2006] is devoted to an exploration of the minutely recorded evidence of the decay of written or recorded matter--or books--or other related surfaces which exhibit the fragmented or riddled traces of their original form. The bookworm becomes a philosophical key to the 125 color images in the book--bookworms literally eat their way through books, putting holes in them, like cheese. But of course, there are many forms of decay. Our culture's latest disregard for the inherent values of the material text, at the dawn of the Age of Information (or Computer Age), is reason enough to be interested in the preservation of books as repositories of knowledge and information. But preservation in this general sense is not Purcell's subject. She's not simply writing an elegy to the book as cultural artifact; she's exploring the visual field of that disintegration for clues and qualities which can transcend the mere concern for its loss--as, literally, unsuspected aesthetic values, finding meaning in the entropic slump of matter, oppressed by the weight of our desire and frustration and neglect, the material consequence of the inertia of intent which our civilization has built up, over centuries. Caches of such detritus are everywhere, one has only to look beyond the shopping centers and freeway overpasses to discover the neglected, rejected, strewn, cast-off, forgotten, abandoned, lost, hidden, used-up, thrown-away, scattered, buried, stashed, saved, deconstructed and appraised stuff--lying everywhere about us on this grizzled, ancient planet we call home. Purcell is a collector, and the more complex, dense and churned the things she finds are, the more she is fascinated and drawn to them. The spaces we inhabit in our imaginations--in our dreams, or our speculations about the structure of memory, or of our thought and sensation--may be expressed by the piecemeal disintegration of physical matter, the valence of which follows predictable and inevitable laws of process. Our familiar tendency in the presence of the weight and strata of decay is to experience fear, revulsion, dismissal. But we know that decay, oxidation, compression, dispersal are in fact the harbingers of renewal, of the process of the restoration of stasis, fertile ground for the cycles of re-use, the eternal plant. Decay, invasive corruption and consumption penetrate and eat away at the edges of intention, desire, feeding a hunger that has no name. There is a beauty in the implosions of matter, the vivid transformation, chemical, fragmented, delicate screens of digest(ion), riddled, organic, bitter and sweet, obdurate and fragile. The disintegrating vestiges of surface-meaning challenge our notions of use, cause our conceptions of the value of such surfaces to undergo a relentless intellectual composting. Purcell notices that photography, the momentary and impulsive fixing of such surfaces through the poised, controlled exposure, can preserve moments of this process. In the campaign of her documentation, richly grained and evocative, the foamy churning of digested matter becomes lush, hypnotic and weird. Is sour the desire of sugar? Do we salvage to sing? Sacrifice excess lots to crunch skeletons of structure? The material text burned onto tablets of sand, glass lens interpolating distortions of the known. As we lose these masses, flickers of light illuminate the pyramid of resistance, what endures in the circus of chaotic species. Climax decay. The deconstruction of disabled formal artifacts suggests abstraction. Meaning gathers around nodes of familiar keys, echoes, clues. But these are all familiar fragments. Within the span of cultural memory, we're on solid ground. But nothing could be less confirming. The orgasm of progress stockpiles products of excess labor. The mind window-shops for stuffed mannikins of abandoned weaves, plastic body parts. Connoisseurs of industrial detritus. Symbiotic companions contract out parasitic eyeless wormlike hoards jiggling through the logarithm of rising fizz. In my earlier posts on Irving Penn and Frederick Sommer, I explored the metaphorical implications of the use of light-sensitive surfaces to bear the self-reflexive relationship between viewer and object, eye and subject. Light is a medium, but it is also a component of matter itself--perhaps, as physicists now believe, the very stuff of matter itself. Light is not only the transmitter of data (of meaning), but also--in its other manifestation as "arrested light" the sensitive surface itself--matter talking to itself. And that is a conversation we sometimes may seem to be overhearing. Some such sense of the overheard seems to be taking place in Purcell's elegant color prints. Carpe diem. In seizing the momentary evidence of the degraded artifacts of our ambitious culture of production, Purcell is holding time to account, demanding of our impatient circumambient distraction, that we pay heed. There's a lush permission about these images in Bookworm, as if we had tunneled into the Pharaoh's tomb, and held the brittle papyrus scroll in our quivering fingers. Our fortunes may be read from just such fleeting formulae. We are shadows and ghosts. The evidence of our having existed, pales in significance to the grander panorama of geologic time. The overwhelming materiality of the quotidian masquerades as random thought, but animation may simply be a projection of a mindless consumption. Form is used up in a circle drawn by the fixed idea. The orbit of anxiety is constantly decaying. Language might decompose at the same rate as attention. We race entropy to the finish line. Rosamund Purcell
Some years ago, I recall seeing mention of photographer Rosamund Purcell teaching a Zone VI workshop. Zone VI was the brand name for a view camera equipment marketing outfit--the brainchild of a photographer named Fred Picker--which sold cameras and tripods and other accessories, mostly by mail order, in the 1980's and '90's. Some of the equipment was good, but not everyone was satisfied with the merchandise. Picker was a big promoter of his own photographic work and his product line. With the decline and impending demise of straight silver process photography, Picker's business fell on hard times. He died in 2002 after a long battle with kidney disease. But Picker isn't the subject of this blog. Rosamond Purcell [1942- ] has become widely known through her publications, including among others Illuminations [1986, a collaboration with the late Stephen Jay Gould]; and Owl's Head [2004], and most recently, Bookworm. Purcell's work has focused primarily on the artifacts of natural history, as a starting point, and over the last several years, on the vivid and immediate visual properties of organic decay. Preservation and disintegration, as metaphors for meaning in photographic imagery. Purcell isn't the only one exploring this kind of imagery, but she's done as much of it, and with more penetration, than anyone else I can think of. Her work has obvious affinities with--for instance--the boxes of Joseph Cornell. Her photographic images often seem like dense arrangements of rotting matter, odd paraphernalia, curios, keepsakes, found objects,--the detritus of gratuitous potlatch--in various states of unkempt decay or breakdown into constituent components through oxidation, consumption by pests, degradation by fire, dampness, pressure, the ravages of time and flux. That ordinary objects may hold the evidence of all this energetic use, on the one hand, or of their abandonment and neglect, on the other, is one of the truisms of her art. Bookworm [2006] is devoted to an exploration of the minutely recorded evidence of the decay of written or recorded matter--or books--or other related surfaces which exhibit the fragmented or riddled traces of their original form. The bookworm becomes a philosophical key to the 125 color images in the book--bookworms literally eat their way through books, putting holes in them, like cheese. But of course, there are many forms of decay. Our culture's latest disregard for the inherent values of the material text, at the dawn of the Age of Information (or Computer Age), is reason enough to be interested in the preservation of books as repositories of knowledge and information. But preservation in this general sense is not Purcell's subject. She's not simply writing an elegy to the book as cultural artifact; she's exploring the visual field of that disintegration for clues and qualities which can transcend the mere concern for its loss--as, literally, unsuspected aesthetic values, finding meaning in the entropic slump of matter, oppressed by the weight of our desire and frustration and neglect, the material consequence of the inertia of intent which our civilization has built up, over centuries. Caches of such detritus are everywhere, one has only to look beyond the shopping centers and freeway overpasses to discover the neglected, rejected, strewn, cast-off, forgotten, abandoned, lost, hidden, used-up, thrown-away, scattered, buried, stashed, saved, deconstructed and appraised stuff--lying everywhere about us on this grizzled, ancient planet we call home. Purcell is a collector, and the more complex, dense and churned the things she finds are, the more she is fascinated and drawn to them. The spaces we inhabit in our imaginations--in our dreams, or our speculations about the structure of memory, or of our thought and sensation--may be expressed by the piecemeal disintegration of physical matter, the valence of which follows predictable and inevitable laws of process. Our familiar tendency in the presence of the weight and strata of decay is to experience fear, revulsion, dismissal. But we know that decay, oxidation, compression, dispersal are in fact the harbingers of renewal, of the process of the restoration of stasis, fertile ground for the cycles of re-use, the eternal plant. Decay, invasive corruption and consumption penetrate and eat away at the edges of intention, desire, feeding a hunger that has no name. There is a beauty in the implosions of matter, the vivid transformation, chemical, fragmented, delicate screens of digest(ion), riddled, organic, bitter and sweet, obdurate and fragile. The disintegrating vestiges of surface-meaning challenge our notions of use, cause our conceptions of the value of such surfaces to undergo a relentless intellectual composting. Purcell notices that photography, the momentary and impulsive fixing of such surfaces through the poised, controlled exposure, can preserve moments of this process. In the campaign of her documentation, richly grained and evocative, the foamy churning of digested matter becomes lush, hypnotic and weird. Is sour the desire of sugar? Do we salvage to sing? Sacrifice excess lots to crunch skeletons of structure? The material text burned onto tablets of sand, glass lens interpolating distortions of the known. As we lose these masses, flickers of light illuminate the pyramid of resistance, what endures in the circus of chaotic species. Climax decay. The deconstruction of disabled formal artifacts suggests abstraction. Meaning gathers around nodes of familiar keys, echoes, clues. But these are all familiar fragments. Within the span of cultural memory, we're on solid ground. But nothing could be less confirming. The orgasm of progress stockpiles products of excess labor. The mind window-shops for stuffed mannikins of abandoned weaves, plastic body parts. Connoisseurs of industrial detritus. Symbiotic companions contract out parasitic eyeless wormlike hoards jiggling through the logarithm of rising fizz. In my earlier posts on Irving Penn and Frederick Sommer, I explored the metaphorical implications of the use of light-sensitive surfaces to bear the self-reflexive relationship between viewer and object, eye and subject. Light is a medium, but it is also a component of matter itself--perhaps, as physicists now believe, the very stuff of matter itself. Light is not only the transmitter of data (of meaning), but also--in its other manifestation as "arrested light" the sensitive surface itself--matter talking to itself. And that is a conversation we sometimes may seem to be overhearing. Some such sense of the overheard seems to be taking place in Purcell's elegant color prints. Carpe diem. In seizing the momentary evidence of the degraded artifacts of our ambitious culture of production, Purcell is holding time to account, demanding of our impatient circumambient distraction, that we pay heed. There's a lush permission about these images in Bookworm, as if we had tunneled into the Pharaoh's tomb, and held the brittle papyrus scroll in our quivering fingers. Our fortunes may be read from just such fleeting formulae. We are shadows and ghosts. The evidence of our having existed, pales in significance to the grander panorama of geologic time. The overwhelming materiality of the quotidian masquerades as random thought, but animation may simply be a projection of a mindless consumption. Form is used up in a circle drawn by the fixed idea. The orbit of anxiety is constantly decaying. Language might decompose at the same rate as attention. We race entropy to the finish line. Rosamund Purcell
Rosamond Wolff Purcell photographs collections of dusty, forgotten objects in such a way that the subject transcends its original identity – a bat preserved in glycerine, a corroded typewriter, a pile of dog skins – to be reinterpreted as a metaphorical, emotional, aesthetically intriguing work of art. She investigates the stripping away of meaning, as well as the additional layers of meaning that arise when an object is removed from its original context and inserted into an alien environment. "Alizarin-stained Shark" (preserved in glycerine, on parchment, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) Purcell has explored the basements and attics of natural history museums, celebrated the cabinet of curiosities of Peter the Great, illuminated the mouldering debris of a strange junkyard in Maine, and faced the glassy gaze of the animals mankind has driven to extinction. With the cooperation of curators of curiosities and monsters like the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Mütter Museum, and in collaboration with experts like paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and natural historian Stephen Jay Gould and sleight-of-hand master and dice collector Ricky Jay, Purcell has spent her career exploring the intersection between art and science and the sometimes beautiful effects of mutation and decay. "Viper" (with bird preserved in alcohol, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) In 1987's Illuminations: A Bestiary, Purcell wrote, "As a photographer I am attracted to zoological collections by virtue of their fragmentary state. Partially eroded or effaced surfaces appeal to me, as would an ancient piece of fresco, a piece of Egyptian linen with faint hallmarks, a piece of text eaten by termites. In these collections, ranging in time between 1650 and 1979, one can find effects parallel to the visual delights inherent in the worn surfaces of human artifacts... The creatures you see were chosen for their visual eloquence and metaphorical suggestiveness." "Night Monkey" (preserved in glycerine, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "Albino Bird of Paradise" (from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) "I am intrigued by traditional museum conceits – classification, juxtaposition of words and objects, the relationship of the collectors and curators to their collections – in short, the grey area between a rational scientific system and human idiosyncrasies. Private and institutional collectors share the same instinctive hunger – to seek, to find, to classify." (from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) "Lobodon" (Bumpy-toothed seal skull, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "I've heard of a man in the deep country who has collected furniture, clothes, paper, and arranged them systematically (by class of object) along the road and through a field. He visits his collection daily, checking, sorting, talking, handling every part to be certain nothing is out of place, nothing goes awry. No conscientious collection manager in a big city museum would do otherwise." (from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) "Typewriter" (from Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things) "Owls from the collection of a blind ornithologist" (from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) "In photographing a mastodon tooth, I chose to kneel down and look up at it set against a cotton sunscreen, because it reminded me of a mountain range. I showed the photograph to the manager of the collection saying, "a real landscape!" He replied with considerable distress, "it's a tooth." Between the scientific name and the visual experience lies the abyss: the laws of classification, artistic license versus scientific certainty, and, most treacherous, the desire to look for metaphor in territory thoroughly mapped by rational minds." (from "The Name of the Game," Art Bulletin, 6/1/95) "Bat" (mouse-tailed bat preserved in glycerine, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "Whatever the technical difficulties of photographing an object through glass, they become insignificant when transparent and translucent surfaces permit a veritable lexicon of illusion. Preservative liquids of various viscosities contrive to grant subjects unexpected depths, faint or dramatic reflections, absent, displaced, or exaggerated detail, and sometimes a selectively mirrored surface which allows a whole room, a window or a courtyard to cross over and present itself head-on in the same plane as the subject, expanding the sense of place and bringing relief to what might otherwise seem an obsessively myopic or clinical view of objects not traditionally considered "artistic" in nature." (from "The Name of the Game," Art Bulletin, 6/1/95) "Chameleon" (preserved in glycerine, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "In the domains of the scientist and curator, the death of an organism is the beginning; it strips away the layer of life. Other layers of information may then vanish with each stage of dissection – the skin from the bone; the bones from the skin; color or opacity from the tissue; or fluids from the vital organs, arteries and veins. Irrelevant layers are discarded as the scientist seeks a proper vantage point for his work... What the viewer to the collections sees then is always partial, sometimes vestigial, and to the nonscientist, often mysterious." (from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "European Moles" (pressed skins, from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) While sifting through dozens of important and venerable collections, Purcell has pondered the drive to collect and classify, often placing the collector himself under the microscope via analysis of his obsessions. "The boxes and boxes of van Heurn's somewhat macabre, perfectly pressed skins of rabbits, rats, dogs, cats, pigs and moles, coupled with his ideas about order and taxonomy, caught my attention long ago. He seemed to me to be a kind of "black hole" collector, insatiable and a bit out of control. He had to have it all." (from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) "Rats in envelope" (repurposed envelope, from Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors) Yet during her explorations of what remains of the world's wunderkammer, Purcell was bitten by the collecting bug herself. She became fascinated by the collection of Ole Worm, a 17th-century Danish archaeologist, embryologist, natural philosopher, physician, and teacher, and eventually attempted to recreate his cabinet of curiosities as a museum exhibition. As a student of decay, Purcell has hauled tons of corroded metal and mouldering paper home from a junkyard in Maine, almost inadvertently creating her own personal museum in which to highlight the more intriguing objects she unearthed. The images here are just a small sample from a couple of Rosamond Purcell's best-known works. Others include Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet, Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals, and Bookworm. Rosamond Purcell's latest book, Egg & Nest, just came off the presses. In his review, documentarian Errol Morris wrote, "In this collection of eggs and nests made of random bric-a-brac, cassette tape, and wire, we're invited to meditate on oology as ontology, ontology as oology, and the paradox of museums as a lifeless record of life. Rosamond Purcell has magnificently returned to her most fascinating obsession, the repurposing of life as the purpose of life." "Alizarin-stained Fish" (preserved in glycerine, on parchment, from Illuminations: A Bestiary) "I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth." – Henry Miller
Rosamond Purcell finds stories, landscapes, and more on their mottled surfaces.
