At the Crossroads of Natural History and Art

As photographer Rosamond Purcell understands it, a common misconception plagues the relationship between scientists and artists: when these two fields interact, “an artist is regarded as a bull in a china shop,” Purcell says. However, two photography exhibits currently on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History—Purcell’s “Egg and Nest” and Amanda Means’ “Looking at Leaves”—demonstrate the way that artists can reveal the aesthetics of the natural world, rather than simply record scientific data about it.

“Each of the photography exhibitions that we have done has been designed to raise different questions about the way we see the world and to attract new audiences,” says Elisabeth Werby, the executive director of HMNH. “They are meant to be intriguing and provocative exhibitions.”

Purcell, who has frequented natural history museums for years, also collaborated with the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould on three books (including “Crossing Over Where Art and Science Meet”). She is living proof that interdisciplinary researchers not only exist, but can apply different insight to an object of study.

Purcell believes that an artist and a scientist can make a “powerful team”; yet she makes the distinction between a scientist and a natural historian, the latter of which relies more on observation than experimentation to come to conclusions about the natural world.

“There is a dialogue that can be had between an artist and a historian of science,” she says. “I don’t think [the two fields] should be conflicting. The angles of view that an artist can bring to bear are equally as valid as those that a scientist can bear.” However, Purcell admits that despite her frequent collaborations with natural historians, she has encountered difficulties in attempting to reconcile her approach with scientists’ when depicting biological collections.

“Egg and Nest,” Purcell’s latest exhibition, opened yesterday. It will be on display through March 15. The exhibition features images of the eggs and nests of various bird species. Photographed from a collection of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in California, the pictures attempt to enhance the visual beauty of natural history collections. For example, they emphasize the aesthetic attributes of the eggs and nests, from their color to their architectural design.

Though Werby believes that these photographs can be “windows into natural history,” she also admits that artists who depict objects in nature confront the unique challenge of distinguishing their works as art. Purcell says that once an artist has developed strategies to overcome this hurdle, she is then capable of bringing to life “visual, evocative qualities” in her subjects through artistic media. Thus she can illuminate aspects of an object in ways different from those achieved through scientific methodology.

“I haven’t gone out to document what is just there,” Purcell says. “I photograph as an artist.”

Her series is one of many examples that suggest the potential discourse between the arts and the sciences.

Similarly, Amanda Means uses her photographs to aestheticize subject matter generally thought to reside only in the scientific realm. “Looking at Leaves” ended Feb. 8. The black and white photographs of the exhibit are products of scientific inquiry into the properties of leaves. Using her media, Means has enhanced nature to render it more visually striking; some of these dramatic and haunting photographs show leaves enlarged to the point of being unrecognizable. She also incorporated her subject matter into the artistic process, for example by placing the leaves in her camera and treating them as negatives.

“These leaf images are at once very artistic and very scientific, but it is not something I consciously strive for,” writes Means in an email. “As a result of the... direction in my work, I have become very interested in learning more about the interactions of science and art.”

“To put it another way, I am interested in the visual arts, and if something scientific is also visually very beautiful and intriguing, then it interests me. The scientific realm is packed full of stunning and mysterious visual imagery,” Means writes.

Werby notes that the creative liberties Means and other artists employ have introduced an alternative, yet equally valid interpretation of the natural world.

“The point of Amanda Means is to make you think that this is not a leaf,” Werby says. “It’s fun to get artists looking at things that scientists might look at, and to see a different way of looking at them.”

For Means, art and science coincide harmoniously; there is no true division between the two discourses. Referring to the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, which she found at once artistic and scientific, Means says the study of both fields is essential to a more profound understanding of the intricacies that govern “the rhythms of nature.”

“I don’t feel there is a conflict. [They] are all parts of the same thing,” she says. “But if people do feel a conflict, I think the more they can gain a deep understanding of both art and of science, the more they will understand the similarities between the two.”

—Staff writer Eunice Y. Kim can be reached at kim30@fas.harvard.edu.