The Photography of Rosamond 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

Gravity of Light : Mike and Doug Starn

”Light is thought, light has gravity, light is what attracts us. The sun is what we want, who we want to be, who controls us. It is the future and the past. A Light too bright to look at, although light itself is invisible. The collection of light is black, and contradictorily, black is the absence of light. Black is both the void and the reservoir of what we need.” — M+D Starn

Descartes claimed that the blind see with their hands; it is a positivist view that to touch something, to determine its contours, is to know it: I “see” it, therefore it is. But this idea does not so much redress but renew the gulf between seeing and knowing: the classic mind-body problem. Centuries later, the French phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty refocused Descartes’ analysis. “There is no vision without thought,” he wrote. “But it is not enough to think in order to see.” In other words, our bodies—our vision—are the permanent condition of our experience, and thought is born by what happens in and on the body. We are conductors; absorbers and emitters of the universe’s energy.

Since well before the Renaissance, light has been used for and understood as a metaphor for illumination, spiritual or intellectual; light is the opposite of dark. Pure light is the carrier of energy at once the message and the messenger. And the news is this: light can bring, in equal measure, life and destruction, energy and fear, illumination and obscurity.”


In their most ambitious project to date, Mike and Doug Starn present Gravity of Light. This exhibit is part art sculpture, part photography, and part scientific experiment that includes a carbon-arc lamp that mimics the sun. This arc lamp is very much the center of the show as it is brilliant and noisy. The 13-foot tall carbon arc lamp is so bright visitors must wear safety glasses in order to protect their retinas. 

The lamp is a facsimile of Sir Humphry Davy’s “voltaic arc” used in the first discovery of electric “artificial light in 1804. The peculiar thirteen-foot-tall mechanical structure at its center is titled Leonardo’s St. John or This is my Middle Finger (2005). In the painting by da Vinci, St. John the Baptist shrouded in darkness, is lit up and points his finger to the heavens, indicating the path to enlightenment.

da Vinci's St. John

The Starn version of St. John’s gesture has been digitally replaced by one of profanity. As Martin Barnes, senior curator of photographs at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, writes, this gesture “is like a rebuff, aimed at paltry human confidence in the face of eternity. Pure light is the carrier of this awesome power, at once the message and the messenger.”

So much about this installation is unique from the carbon-arc lamp illumination to the location of the exhibit. Although the Cincinnati Museum of Art sponsored this exhbit its location is not within the museum. Holy Cross Church at the Mount Adams Monastery is the place where you can view the Starn show.

Holy Cross Church is an old abandoned church. You can see the faded paintings and religious images on the wall. The whole building is in disrepair and the Starn imagery, large and beautifully photographed contrast with the crumbling bricks and faded religious iconography. Each of these photographs each deal with the theme of light’s effect. One of their large moth photographs shows the insect from a previous exhibit, Attracted to Light. The moth is attracted to the light which often leads to their own death, yet they can't resist it. It is what human and non-human crave, the light, that which helps us to visually see or to see the spiritual light.

Another piece is of the Buddhist monk Ganjin, it towers over us at the opposite end of the church. Ganjin was blind yet with an inner vision. He saw the black is still filled with light and saw the light inside of himself, found through a form of Eastern religious discovery. He too like the moth was attracted to the light not in the physical sense but in the spiritual one. 

Light can be a blessing but can also bring death through the blinding light of the carbon-arc lamp. Light can bring, in equal measure, life and destruction, energy and fear, illumination and obscurity.

The Starn exhibit is put on by the Cincinnati Museum of Art and closes on December 30, 2012. You can read about the show in the accompanying book Gravity of Light.

Articles:
FotoFocus
The Scariness and Brilliance of the Starns’ ‘Gravity of Light’

What is the Light? Doug & Mike Starn: Gravity of Light

Books in the Art Division's collection. Click to access the catalog.

Giotto: Trecento Master

Giotto
Giotto di Bondone

There is a story about Giotto that was told by another artist, Cimabue. Cimabue was walking through the countryside to visit the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. He saw a young boy drawing his sheep flock with a stone in the sand. Cimabue said, “This boy will be a Prodigy,” and then asked Giotto’s parents if Giotto could become his apprentice. That is the beginning of Giotto's career as the inventor of realism and detail in painting.

Giotto, born 1267 – January 8, 1337 is an Italian painter and architect from Florence in the late Middle Ages. He is said to be the founder of the Italian Renaissance. He brought his own sense of what he thought a painting should look by rejecting the Italo-Byzantine form of stylized painting and brought a sense of realism and naturalism to his work. The late-16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari describes Giotto as making a decisive break with the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years. Not only was he noted for his realistic human figures but he brought a new vision to perspective. His knowledge of painting influenced those High Renaissance painters that came after him like Michelangelo and Raphael. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull, Penguin Classics, (1965)

Giotto is known for his clear, simple solutions to the basic problems of the representation of space and of the volume, structure, and solidity of 3-dimensional forms, and above all the human figure. He was also a genius at getting to the heart of whatever episode from sacred history he was representing,  finding the compositional means to express its innermost spiritual meaning and its psychological effects in terms of simple areas of paint. 


After leaving his home to go work as an apprentice for Cimabue he went on to become of the most famous painters of Tuscany. Cimabue was one of the first Italian painters to make a make from the Italo-Byzantine style but he still relied on some Byzantine models. While Giotto brought his sense of realism to a work, Cimabue clearly painted in a style that is clearly Medieval with stylized elongated figures. Giotto worked on Cimabue’s paintings while Cimabue was absent from the studio. Giotto had extraordinary skill and rendered his subjects with lifelike precision. While working on one of Cimabue’s paintings he painted a fly on one of the faces with such a realistic representation that Cimabue tried brushing it off.

You can see the differences in the two works below. The one on the left was done by Cimabue. It has the gold background typical for Byzantine works, elongated figures on a flat plane with little dimension to them. On the right is Giotto's work, Ognissanti Madaonna, where he has created a feeling of depth, the figures occupy a deeper space as compared to Cimabue's work. Even the Madonna's throne recedes in depth.

                                         

Maesta. 1280-1285, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

There is a lot of disagreement about Giotto’s life. Many speculated on his place of birth, his appearance and there are arguments about what he did and did not paint. One of these arguments surrounds the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi. Cimabue was commissioned to paint many of the large frescoes at this newly built basilica and it is said that Giotto accompanied him. The attribution of the fresco cycle of the Life of St. Francis in the Upper Church is a hotly debated topic among art historians.

Basilica of St Francis of Assisi

From Wikipedia:

“From Rome, Cimabue went to Assisi to paint several large frescoes at the newly-built Basilica of St Francis of Assisi, and it is possible, but not certain, that Giotto went with him. The attribution of the fresco cycle of the Life of St. Francis in the Upper Church has been one of the most hotly disputed in art history. The documents of the Franciscan Friars that relate to artistic commissions during this period were destroyed by Napoleon's troops, who stabled horses in the Upper Church of the Basilica, and scholars have been divided over whether or not Giotto was responsible for the Francis Cycle. In the absence of documentary evidence to the contrary, it has been convenient to ascribe every fresco in the Upper Church that was not obviously by Cimabue to Giotto, whose prestige has overshadowed that of almost every contemporary. Some of the earliest remaining biographical sources, such as Ghiberti and Riccobaldo Ferrarese, suggest that the fresco cycle of the life of St Francis in the Upper Church was his earliest autonomous work. However, since the idea was put forward by the German art historian, Friedrich Rintelen in 1912, many scholars have expressed doubt that Giotto was in fact the author of the Upper Church frescoes. Without documentation, arguments on the attribution have relied upon connoisseurship, a notoriously unreliable "science."However, technical examinations and comparisons of the workshop painting processes at Assisi and Padua in 2002 have provided strong evidence that Giotto did not paint the St. Francis Cycle. There are many differences between the Francis Cycle and the Arena Chapel frescoes that are difficult to account for by the stylistic development of an individual artist. It seems quite possible that several hands painted the Assisi frescoes, and that the artists were probably from Rome. If this is the case, then Giotto's frescoes at Padua owe much to the naturalism of these painters.”

Detail from a fresco at the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi that is said to be done be Giotto. Click on the image for more information about this work.

More information about this at Cimabue and Giotto Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists

Detail: Scrovegni Chapel

Around 1305 Giotto completed what is considered to be the masterpiece of Early Renaissance, Scrovegni Chapel also known as the Arena Chapel in Padua, This cycle’s theme is Salvation with emphasis on the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. This cycle was commissioned by Enrico degli Scrovegni. The chapel is dedicated to the Annunciation. The theme is Salvation, and there is an emphasis on the Virgin Mary, as the chapel is dedicated to the Annunciation and to the Virgin of Charity. As is common in the decoration of the medieval period in Italy, the west wall is dominated by the Last Judgement. On either side of the chancel are complementary paintings of the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary, depicting the Annunciation. This scene is incorporated into the cycles of The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary and The Life of Christ. The source for The Life of the Virgin is the Golden Legend of Jacopo da Voragine while The Life of Christ draws upon the Meditations on the Life of Christ by the Pseudo-Bonaventura. Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, The Usurer's Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua, University Park, 2008; Laura Jacobus,Giotto and the Arena Chapel: Art, Architecture and Experience, London, 2008; Andrew Ladis, Giotto's O: Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel, University Park, 2009

The cycle is divided into 37 scenes, arranged around the lateral walls in 3 tiers, starting in the upper register with the story of Joachim and Anna, the parents of the Virgin and continuing with the story of Mary. The life of Jesus occupies two registers. The Last Judgment fills the entire pictorial space of the counter-façade.

Detail: Last Judgment

Giotto paid a great deal of attention to detail and his figures draw on classical sculpture. Unlike Cimabue Giotto reject styling figures and rejected the elongation of the figure as byzantine models often did. His figures are solid, have three-dimensional qualities and gestures that are taken from observation. The clothing is not formalized but have dimension and weight. With these frescoes, Giotto gained a reputation for setting a new realistic standard in painting.

Florence Cathedral

Along with attaining fame as a painter, Giotto was also commissioned as an architect. In 1334 he was as given a major architectural commission as the architect of the new campanile (bell tower) of the Florence Cathedral. This bell tower is a free-standing structure that is part of other buildings that make up Florence Cathedral on the Piazza del Duomo in Florence, This masterpiece of Gothic Architecture was designed entirely by Giotto and is encrusted with polychrome marble and sculptural decoration.

Giotto’s life and work is argued among scholars with many is disagreeing on his birthdate, birthplace, his apprenticeship, the order in which he created his works, and whether or not he painted the famous frescoes at Assisi, (see above) and his burial place. Two things about his life that are agreed upon: his Scrovegni Chapel frescoes and his design for the campinale of the Florence Cathedral.

Giotto died in January 1337. According to Vasari,Giotto was buried in Santa Maria del Fiore, the Cathedral of Florence, on the left of the entrance and with the spot marked by a white marble plaque. According to other sources, he was buried in the Church of Santa Reparata. These apparently contradictory reports are explained by the fact that the remains of Santa Reparata lie directly beneath the Cathedral and the church continued in use while the construction of the cathedral was proceeding in the early 14th century.

During an excavation in the 1970s bones were discovered beneath the paving of Santa Reparata at a spot close to the location given by Vasari, but unmarked on either level. Forensic examination of the bones by anthropologist Francesco Mallegni and a team of experts in 2000 brought to light some facts that seemed to confirm that they were those of a painter, particularly the range of chemicals, including arsenic and lead, both commonly found in paint, that the bones had absorbed.

The bones were those of a very short man, of little over four feet tall, who may have suffered from a form of congenital dwarfism. This supports a tradition at the Church of Santa Croce that a dwarf who appears in one of the frescoes is a self-portrait of Giotto. On the other hand, a man wearing a white hat who appears in the Last Judgement at Padua is also said to be a portrait of Giotto. The appearance of this man conflicts with the image in Santa Croce.

Vasari, drawing on a description by Boccaccio, who was a friend of Giotto, says of him that "there was no uglier man in the city of Florence" and indicates that his children were also plain in appearance. There is a story that Dante visited Giotto while he was painting the Scrovegni Chapel and, seeing the artist's children underfoot asked how a man who painted such beautiful pictures could create such plain children, to which Giotto, who according to Vasari was always a wit, replied "I made them in the dark."

Forensic reconstruction of the skeleton at Santa Reperata showed a short man with a very large head, a large hooked nose and one eye more prominent than the other. The bones of the neck indicated that the man spent a lot of time with his head tilted backwards. The front teeth were worn in a way consistent with frequently holding a brush between the teeth. The man was about 70 at the time of death.

While the Italian researchers were convinced that the body belonged to Giotto and it was reburied with honor near the grave of Brunelleschi, others have been highly skeptical. (Wikipedia article).

Peruzzi Altarpiece, about 1309–15, Giotto di Bondone and His Workshop.
Tempera and gilded gesso on poplar panel, 41 5/8 x 98 1/2 in. (105.7 x 250.2 cm).
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, GL.60.17.7Click on image for more information

More information on Giotto here at the Athenaeum

At Duke University

Click on images below for more information about the exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum

Left: The Virgin and Child with Saints and Allegorical Figures, about 1315–20, Giotto di Bondone (Italian, about 1267–1337). Tempera and gold leaf on panel. Private Collection. Courtesy of Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York. Right: The Crucifixion, about 1315-20, Giotto di Bondone. Tempera and gold leaf on panel. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg, photo M. Bertola

Some books at the Central Library's Art Division about Giotto
Click on image to connect with the library catalog

The boy who drew sheep