Rosamond Purcell

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)