Excerpt from the Conduit Interview
Rosamond Purcell
Resuscitates the Ruins
In Rosamond Purcell’s photography, what is passing or has passed from existence—be it a creature, a moment, or an idea—is filled with inviolable presence. Decay
animates the artist here, even as the artist animates decay, seeking to unlock the
vitality within it. As Rikki Ducornet has written, “Purcell’s intention
is not merely to offer a glimpse of the world’s ‘fantastic edges’…but
to remind us that the informed heart encompasses all edges, imagined and unimaginable,
known, unknown and knowable.”
Purcell’s unique approach to the quietude of stillness can be found in her early
monographs but flourished when she began to poke around “in the back rooms of
old museums,” which led to three extraordinary volumes created with the late
Stephen Jay Gould. She is also the author of Special Cases, a wide-ranging survey
of “historical monsters” she curated for the Getty Museum, and her photographs
of extinct and endangered species are featured in Swift as a Shadow.
Eric Lorberer interrogated Purcell on the phone for a small epoch. Both lamented
that the interview could not take place in Purcell’s crowded studio, in which
the detritus that has caught the photographer’s eye has come to rest and to
be resurrected. Here, nothing is truly extinct.
conduit: You
created three books with the late Stephen Jay Gould, thrilling works that point to
the juncture, as aptly state by the subtitle of Crossing Over, "where art and
science meet." How did this ongoing collaboration come about?
purcell: Oh, that’s a long story, and I can really only tell part
of it here.…I had been working in the museum for a couple of years before I
met Stephen. I was a fan of his writing; I had read his first essay books, and much
to my amazement I understood what he was trying to say, which is part of his incredible
genius—his essays are accessible to people from very different backgrounds.
You don’t have to be a scientist to read and get something out of them. Anyway,
he saw my work and liked it; he was really the only curator in the museum who understood
what my pictures were about—that is, that they weren’t standard natural
history records of the animals in place with a ruler or coin for scale, but that
they were attempts to see the animals for what other things they suggested. Did they
suggest a sort of aerial view, or materials that were artificial, or... you see,
I didn’t come in with any expectations of what I was supposed to do with the
animals; therefore I was able to consider them as raw data, visually speaking. I
could use any tools I happened to have to contemplate these museum specimens, which
are profoundly artificial, by the way—they are not really "natural"
because of all the things that have been done to them. But I could contemplate
them from the point of view of their being pure subject matter: form and shape and
contour and texture. I could juxtapose the specimens the way I chose more or less,
if the curators would let me do so. And Stephen Gould would be able to look at the
pictures and to get something out of the juxtaposition that actually allowed him
to talk about a general scientific principle. So whether it was size or scale, algorithmic
properties, what it means to be twins… all sorts of subjects were inherent in
the pictures.
So rather than collaborate with a poet or a literary writer, I had the very good
fortune to collaborate with a natural historian. He was not only an historian of
science, but he was a biologist who understood the physical properties of animals,
both human and non-human. There’s so much about the way we worked together that
was fairly unusual; most times a scientist will ask an artist or illustrator to please
go out and get what they call "figures," to get an illustration that will
demonstrate their point of view or theory, whatever it is that they are trying to
explain in mathematical or quantitative terms. In this case, I would come to him
with the pictures and he would look through them and he would read them the way somebody
else might read tea leaves. From the particular composition or arrangement he could
deduce general principles that were scientific, and not aesthetic or literary. It’s
a backward kind of collaborating. The fact that he was one of the only people who
really got it was because he himself was not very fond of nature photography—there
were certain conventional ways of taking pictures and to start with a desiccated
museum specimen was not a particularly conventional way of doing it. But I was starting
with a specimen not to prove anything about it, but to look at it on its own terms.
conduit: The reader learns much from the interaction of art and science
in these books—what do you think each of you learned from working with each
other?
purcell: I’m not sure I had anything to teach him, but I think
that I may have been able to show him, or surprise him, with some view that he might
not have anticipated. He never told me what picture to take. Once in a while he would
urge me to do more fossils than I necessarily wanted to, and I would try to talk
him into more monkeys than he wanted to contemplate… we definitely had our preferences.
In Finders Keepers there are a couple of chapters where he suggested the collector
and really did imply the approach. One of the chapters where I felt we were in concert
was the one on Augustino Scilla, where I photographed both the fossils and the original
drawings that the man who found the fossils had made of them. And the chapter itself
is all about scientific truth and artistic license, the conclusion being that the
scientist and artist are one and the same. It was the sixteen hundreds, a time when
there was no photography so you drew a picture of your specimen in order to fully
understand it. The point of this is that the drawings, when compared to the actual
specimens, are more refined and reveal more about the bedding plane of the fossil
and what its placement was in the matrix than the specimen itself. And it has to
do with the light and the shading and just the detail that a pencil drawing can give.
I remember being absolutely thrilled to be able to photograph the fossils and the
drawings that went with them, even though it might be viewed as copy-stand work.
And I don’t necessarily think those pictures are thrilling. Of course Stephen
liked it because it was the classical combination of the specimen and the data. When
I turned some specimens inside out—the Howler Monkey picture in Illuminations
for example, or the mastodon tooth that looks like a mountain—I would take a
photograph in which the specimen didn’t look anything like itself; it looked
like something else. I would bring the picture to him and he would know what it was
that it looked like. [laughs] Then he would know why that resemblance also had a
scientific resonance. So Stephen kind of legitimized the pictures in a scientific
context. On the other hand, I think he enjoyed doing it.