Overview

A major monograph published to accompany the first museum survey of the renowned photographer and conceptual artist Rosamond Purcell (b. 1942), known for her strangely beautiful, often unsettling photographs of objects from the natural and man-made

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9780847872282

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Throughout her more than 50-year practice, Purcell has collaborated with paleontologists, literary scholars, historians, museum curators and erudite magicians, and has drawn inspiration from iconoclastic sources, from a 13-acre junkyard in Maine to natural history museum collections from around the world. A pioneer of fine art color photography and an inspiration to a generation of artists from Mark Dion to Sally Mann, Purcell probes the actions of time and decay as elemental to the natural world and the human condition. -LIVE AUCTIONEERS

Throughout her more than 50-year practice, Purcell has collaborated with paleontologists, literary scholars, historians, museum curators and erudite magicians, and has drawn inspiration from iconoclastic sources, from a 13-acre junkyard in Maine to natural history museum collections from around the world. A pioneer of fine art color photography and an inspiration to a generation of artists from Mark Dion to Sally Mann, Purcell probes the actions of time and decay as elemental to the natural world and the human condition. -LIVE AUCTIONEERS Throughout her more than 50-year practice, Purcell has collaborated with paleontologists, literary scholars, historians, museum curators and erudite magicians, and has drawn inspiration from iconoclastic sources, from a 13-acre junkyard in Maine to natural history museum collections from around the world. A pioneer of fine art color photography and an inspiration to a generation of artists from Mark Dion to Sally Mann, Purcell probes the actions of time and decay as elemental to the natural world and the human condition. -LIVE AUCTIONEERS From luscious large format Polaroid prints to objects rescued from obscurity, the empathetic, evocative, and multifaceted work of the photographer and conceptual artist Rosamond Purcell explores the ill-defined interstices between the unsettling and the sublime, the beautiful and the bizarre, the natural and the manufactured. As a body of work, it lays bare humanity's desperate desire to collect and make sense of it all. -SALEM NEWS Expect to be overwhelmed, not just by quantity (quality, too) but also variety and, for lack of a better word, theatricality. Purcell's profound, even exacting, respect for her subject matter doesn't keep her from honoring it with bravura treatment. It's hard to think of a photographer with a body of work less given to what she calls the curse of the predictable in what was then a pre-Photoshop world. Few things are as unpredictable as enchantment, and enchantment is what her work frequently has to offer. -BOSTON GLOBE What is an appropriate subject for art? asks Errol Morris in his foreword to ROSAMOND PURCELL: NATURE STANDS Aside (Rizzoli Electa/Addison Gallery, $65). I'm partial to death and deliquescence. This morbid domain is Purcell's field of operation, and her particular territory is the natural-history museums where she documents the corpora of the formerly living: birds, eggs, shells, bats, butterflies, monkeys, moles, and lizards. Her high-contrast color photos feature straightforward, portrait-style compositions-as if a group of Javanese wattled lapwings were posing for their high school club photo. There's no need to defamiliarize a mastodon's molar or the corpse of a pig-footed bandicoot. But this directness with its seeming lack of aesthetic inflection is deceptive. By prizing clarity and detail over compositional finesse, Purcell emphasizes the strangeness of her subjects even as her clinical approach lends an ordinariness to the viewer's experience. -BOOKFORUM

"""Throughout her more than 50-year practice, Purcell has collaborated with paleontologists, literary scholars, historians, museum curators and erudite magicians, and has drawn inspiration from iconoclastic sources, from a 13-acre junkyard in Maine to natural history museum collections from around the world. A pioneer of fine art color photography and an inspiration to a generation of artists from Mark Dion to Sally Mann, Purcell probes the actions of time and decay as elemental to the natural world and the human condition."" —LIVE AUCTIONEERS ""Throughout her more than 50-year practice, Purcell has collaborated with paleontologists, literary scholars, historians, museum curators and erudite magicians, and has drawn inspiration from iconoclastic sources, from a 13-acre junkyard in Maine to natural history museum collections from around the world. A pioneer of fine art color photography and an inspiration to a generation of artists from Mark Dion to Sally Mann, Purcell probes the actions of time and decay as elemental to the natural world and the human condition."" —LIVE AUCTIONEERS ""From luscious large format Polaroid prints to objects rescued from obscurity, the empathetic, evocative, and multifaceted work of the photographer and conceptual artist Rosamond Purcell explores the ill-defined interstices between the unsettling and the sublime, the beautiful and the bizarre, the natural and the manufactured. As a body of work, it lays bare humanity’s desperate desire to collect and make sense of it all."" —SALEM NEWS “Expect to be overwhelmed, not just by quantity (quality, too) but also variety and, for lack of a better word, theatricality. Purcell’s profound, even exacting, respect for her subject matter doesn’t keep her from honoring it with bravura treatment. It’s hard to think of a photographer with a body of work less given to what she calls “the curse of the predictable in what was then a pre-Photoshop world.” Few things are as unpredictable as enchantment, and enchantment is what her work frequently has to offer.” —BOSTON GLOBE “What is an appropriate subject for art?” asks Errol Morris in his foreword to ROSAMOND PURCELL: NATURE STANDS Aside (Rizzoli Electa/Addison Gallery, $65). “I’m partial to death and deliquescence.” This morbid domain is Purcell’s field of operation, and her particular territory is the natural-history museums where she documents the corpora of the formerly living: birds, eggs, shells, bats, butterflies, monkeys, moles, and lizards. Her high-contrast color photos feature straightforward, portrait-style compositions—as if a group of Javanese wattled lapwings were posing for their high school club photo. There’s no need to defamiliarize a mastodon’s molar or the corpse of a pig-footed bandicoot. But this directness with its seeming lack of aesthetic inflection is deceptive. By prizing clarity and detail over compositional finesse, Purcell emphasizes the strangeness of her subjects even as her clinical approach lends an ordinariness to the viewer’s experience.” —BOOKFORUM “Expect to be overwhelmed, not just by quantity (quality, too) but also variety and, for lack of a better word, theatricality. Purcell’s profound, even exacting, respect for her subject matter doesn’t keep her from honoring it with bravura treatment. It’s hard to think of a photographer with a body of work less given to what she calls “the curse of the predictable in what was then a pre-Photoshop world.” Few things are as unpredictable as enchantment, and enchantment is what her work frequently has to offer.” —BOSTON GLOBE “What is an appropriate subject for art?” asks Errol Morris in his foreword to ROSAMOND PURCELL: NATURE STANDS Aside (Rizzoli Electa/Addison Gallery, $65). “I’m partial to death and deliquescence.” This morbid domain is Purcell’s field of operation, and her particular territory is the natural-history museums where she documents the corpora of the formerly living: birds, eggs, shells, bats, butterflies, monkeys, moles, and lizards. Her high-contrast color photos feature straightforward, portrait-style compositions—as if a group of Javanese wattled lapwings were posing for their high school club photo. There’s no need to defamiliarize a mastodon’s molar or the corpse of a pig-footed bandicoot. But this directness with its seeming lack of aesthetic inflection is deceptive. By prizing clarity and detail over compositional finesse, Purcell emphasizes the strangeness of her subjects even as her clinical approach lends an ordinariness to the viewer’s experience.” —BOOKFORUM ""This monograph by notable local artist Rosamond Purcell serves as the catalogue of a spectacular career retrospective exhibition currently taking up the entire 2nd floor of the Addison Gallery in Andover until Dec. 31st. With several insightful essays as well as an interview with the artist, this book stunningly displays the evolution of this remarkable American artist."" —PORTER SQUARE BOOKS"

Author Information

Gordon Wilkins is the Robert M. Walker Associate Curator of American Art at the Addison Gallery of American Art. Mark Dion is a conceptual artist living and working in New York. Christoph Irmscher is a writer and biographer, and the a

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