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Published: Tue Jan 30 2018
Eva Lundsager, We are quiet (nowhere to hide) (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
AGNI 58 Print Only

Rosamond Purcell grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and received her BA from Boston University. She is an acclaimed art and natural-history photographer. A retrospective of her work, Nature Stands Aside, is currently on exhibit at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. She took the photographs that appear in A Glorious Enterprise, an overview of the 200 years of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia; installed into the permanent collection of the Natural History Museum, Copenhagen, a reconstruction of the seventeenth-century museum of doctor and professor Ole Worm, based on his 1655 catalog; published, with Michael Witmore, Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare (Norton); and curated, also with Michael Witmore, “Very Like a Whale,” a 2012 exhibition of books, artifacts, and images at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her books include Illuminations: A Bestiary (with Stephen Jay Gould), Pole Dancing: Close Encounters with Utility Poles, Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors (text by Stephen Jay Gould), Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck (text by Ricky Jay), Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters, Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things, Bookworm: The Art of Rosamond Purcell (introduction by Sven Birkerts), and Egg & Nest. (updated 10/2022)

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