Egg & Nest - Hardcover

Purcell, Rosamond; Hall, Linnea S.; Corado, René

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674031725 ISBN 13: 9780674031722

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2008

Synopsis

The beauty of the robin’s egg is not lost on the child who discovers the nest, nor on the collector of nature’s marvels. Such instances of wonder find fitting expression in the photographs of Rosamond Purcell, whose work captures the intricacy of nests and the aesthetic perfection of bird eggs. Mining the ornithological treasures of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, Purcell produces pictures as lovely and various as the artifacts she photographs. The dusky blue egg of an emu becomes a planet. A woodpecker’s nest bears an uncanny resemblance to a wooden shoe. A resourceful rock dove weaves together scrap metal and spent fireworks. A dreamscape of dancing monkeys emerges from the calligraphic markings of a murre egg.

Alongside Purcell’s photographs, Linnea Hall and René Corado offer an engaging history of egg collecting, the provenance of the specimens in the photographs, and the biology, conservation, and ecology of the birds that produced them. They highlight the scientific value that eggs and nest hold for understanding and conserving birds in the wild, as well as the aesthetic charge they carry for us.

How has evolution shaped the egg or directed the design of the nest? How do the photographs convey such infinitesimal and yet momentous happenstance? The objects in Egg & Nest are specimens of natural history, and in Purcell’s renderings, they are also the most natural art.

About this title

About the Author

Rosamond Purcell is a world-renowned photographer and the author of a number of books, including Owl’s Head and Bookworm.

Linnea S. Hall is the Executive Director of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, California.

René Corado is Collections Manager of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, California.

Bernd Heinrich is Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Vermont. He has written several memoirs of his life in science and nature, including One Man’s Owl, Ravens in Winter, and A Year in the Maine Woods, which won the 1995 Rutstrum Authors’ Award for Literary Excellence.

Review

“What kind of genius is Rosamond Purcell? Is she an artist? A scholar? A documentarian? A living cabinet of wonders? Her originality defies category, as does her newest triumph, Egg & Nest. Crack its shell.”―Jonathan Safran Foer

“Rosamond Purcell is one of the great photographers. She has captured the history of objects by photographing them in romantic decline-- books scourged by worms, petrified food-stuffs, biological specimens gone wrong, the inexorable entropic winding down of everything. Egg & Nest is yet another example of her ability to make the ordinary extraordinary: Collecting people, collecting things, collecting people collecting things and creating something new and wonderful. 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.”―Errol Morris

“[Purcell's] work is concerned with the magic in ordinary objects, but also the aesthetics of conservation and collection, as many of her images of objects from natural-history museums demonstrate. Purcell's latest project, a collection of photographs taken at the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, in California, is a more serene and stately work, showcasing the variety of the avian world.”―Andrea Walker, New Yorker blog

“[A] fascinating book...While this volume is not an art book per se, it is a lively history of egg collecting, or oology...The photographs, both those taken under laboratory conditions and those taken in the wild, are extraordinary, showing the variety of egg sizes, shapes, patterns, and textures: Mottled blue-gray Emu eggs look like fine-grained granite, while the vigorous dark brown markings of the glossy, tawny-colored eggs of the Northern Jacana of Mexico suggest Easter eggs decorated by Jackson Pollock. Equally compelling are Purcell's photographs of birds' nests, beautifully lit and formed of all sorts of materials: A raven's nest of twigs is lined with cotton batting for comfort. A Guatemalan nest of the Banded Wren looks like a crown of thorns--those thorns offering defense from predators. The miniscule vegetable-down nest of an Anna's Hummingbird collected in Santa Monica, California, in 1903 is ingeniously woven around the glass insulator of a telegraph line. All in all, there is considerable beauty and wonderment in this book.”―The Magazine Antiques

“Photographer Rosamond Purcell has made a career out of creating intriguing images of decaying objects... Her new book, Egg and Nest, focuses on one of the world's premier collections of bird eggs and nests, located at the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, near Los Angeles. Nests are held together with whatever materials the birds could find: spider webs, fishing line, mud, and condensed saliva. Eggs, too, are varied: green, blue, speckled, covered by a swirl of markings.”―Jan Gardner, Boston Globe

“Purcell uses her camera to transform the everyday ordinary into something extraordinary. She captures the diverse beauty, quirkiness and allure of eggs and the remarkable resourcefulness of birds, focusing on the intricacy of nests and the aesthetic perfection of bird eggs. The rich colors, lighting and textures make her photographs of eggs, nests and birds look three dimensional, as though the eggs could easily fall out of one of the photographs, as if falling from a nest.”―Kurt Shaw, Pittsburgh Tribune Review

“If you are wondering why anyone would spend a life in a pursuit as eccentric as collecting eggs and nests, Ms. Purcell's work will tell you. She selected a range of specimens, eggs brightly colored and plain, and nests made conventionally of twigs or of materials as bizarre as nails. Then she photographed them in natural light. Her luminous results explain without words why people have been collecting eggs and nests for centuries.”―Cornelia Dean, New York Times

“Beautiful...Egg & Nest reminds the reader of the civilized, tactile, sensual and emotive pleasures of holding a book in hand as opposed to reading from a glowing light box. Printed in Italy, it combines fabulous image reproduction--each page a magic revelation--with informative and insightful text, Purcell being as adept with words as with a lens.”―Mary Thomas, Pittsburgh-Post Gazette

“Spend some time with Rosamond Purcell's enthralling photographs in Egg & Nest, and you might be tempted to become an oologist. Oology is not the science of oohs and ahs but the practice, frowned on in the civilized world, of collecting rare eggs and nests. Most of the photographs were taken at the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, Calif., which combines the collections of many Victorian bird enthusiasts. There's a woodpecker's nest in the shape of a wooden shoe, a grackle's nest woven of lace and audiotape, and a nest from Wasilla, Alaska, lined with feathers and fur. Unbearably poignant is a photograph of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, who died in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914. You'll even find a definitive answer to the age-old conundrum about the chicken or the egg. Hint: Ex ovo omnia.”―Christopher Benfey, Slate

“Purcell doesn't just delve into the history of egg obsession. She captures the variety and beauty of eggs and nests in beautiful photographs. Unless you're an ornithologist, you probably don't have a wide frame of reference for the sheer diversity of eggs. From the ultra glossy, Easter eggs of the Tinamou to the brown, blue and purple mottled eggs of the Chuck-Will's-Widow to the pyriform eggs of the Common Murres, pear-shaped to help prevent the eggs from rolling down the cliffs on which their nest perch, the assortment from page to page is stunning.”―Curious Expeditions

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0674031725
• ISBN 13: 9780674031722
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 222