Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15039 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 232 pages

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. Egg & Nest is a summation of what she does best: collecting people, collecting things, collecting people collecting things, and creating something new and wonderful. Here she has magnificently returned to her most fascinating obsession, the repurposing of life as the purpose of life." -Errol Morris"

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 (20081103)

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 (20081001)

[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 20081002)

[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 20081007)

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 )

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 of Biology at the University of Vermont. He has written several memoirs of his life in science and nature, including One Man’s Owl, and Ravens in Winter. Bumblebee Economics was twice a nominee for the American Book Award in Science, and A Year in the Maine Woods won the 1995 Rutstrum Authors’ Award for Literary Excellence.

Customer Reviews

A Celebration of Oology
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's a famous conundrum, but a bogus one; the mutation that created the genus Gallus induced a chicken to hatch from an egg laid by a bird not quite of that taxon. Of course, it was the egg that came first.
An understanding of eggs is prerequisite to a true comprehension of the birds they deliver. Much of our modern knowledge of bird eggs, and the diverse nests that harbor them, is based on the work of egg-collectors (oologists) from a century or more ago. At the height of its popularity, commercial and otherwise irresponsible egg collecting tarnished oology's image, but its scientific value persists and cannot be underestimated. A staggering database survives in the form of well-tended egg collections, including those of the British Museum, the Smithsonian and others. Less well-known is the biggest collection of them all, that of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, founded in 1956 by Ed Harrison, with over 190,000 sets and a million individual eggs, as well as 18,000 nests and 54,000 study skins.
Harvard University Press has just produced a beautiful new book celebrating this collection. Egg & Nest is first and foremost a picture book, featuring spectacular photographs by the gifted Rosamond Purcell, whose collaborations with Stephen Jay Gould and her own books, including Dice, Bookworm and Owls Head, are well-known. Over 175 color photographs of the WFVZ collection are featured, each one an aesthetic and zoological pleasure. Many of the images simply glorify the obvious beauty of their subjects: the deep glossy greens of tinamou eggs, the marbled copper patina of Emu eggs, the dainty hieroglyphics gracing Icterid eggs, and the 2-dimensional calcium carbonate filligree shrouding the eggs of the Guira Cuckoo. Others aim to inform us: desiccated maggots still clinging to the collapsed hull of a Brown pelican egg, a victim of organochlorine pesticides; a series of deformed chicken eggs, some resembling pallid gourds, one of them double-shelled--a window bored into the outer shell reveals its hidden twin. Some of the plates thrill us with their rarity: eggs and study skins of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, Passenger Pigeons and Carolina Parakeets stand beside centuries-old Elephant Bird eggs and a mounted Heath Hen. Others charm us with their novelty, like a number of wren and hummingbird nests built in and upon chunks of human hardware. Each plate is captioned with collection data, and, in most cases, with background on the subject's natural history.

The plate section is contained within bookends: the first one containing a general introduction by biologist Bernd Heinrich and an introduction to the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology written by Linnea S. Hall, its executive director, and René Corado, its collections manager. This section includes a history of the collection and its founder, and of the practice of oology. The final bookend was penned by the photographer, and includes poetic reflections on her experience photographing the collection. Throughout, the text is well-written, with the layperson in mind, but containing enough good information to satisfy the expert.