快猫短视频

Ocean Flowers: Impressions from nature edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, Princeton University Press, $49.95/拢32.50, ISBN 0691119481

MARY Matilda Howard had it right when she eulogised seaweed in her book Ocean Flowers and Their Teachings (1846):

鈥淥h! Call us not weeds, but flowers of the sea,

For lovely, and gay, and bright-tinted are we!

Our Blush is as deep as the rose of thy bowers,

Then call us not weeds, we are Ocean鈥檚 gay flowers.鈥�

The title of Ocean Flowers is a tribute to Howard, and this book is an extraordinarily beautiful compendium of natural history illustration, matched by searching ideas about what is going into and is being projected by these images. Most of the illustrations come from the mid-19th century, a time when natural history was so popular that a proposed competition for best album had to be cut back after leading botanists pointed out that collectors were endangering species.

The images form a utilitarian catalogue of species identification, yet now they are art objects. Even when they were created, the drawings of plants made by Indian artists for their colonial patrons, for example, were influenced by Mughal style. Some of the images were triumphant experiments in developing technology to capture the delicacy of seaweeds 鈥� from the brilliant blue of the sun-developed cyanotypes Anna Atkins made of British algae around 1850 to Julia Margaret Cameron鈥檚 precise 鈥淢y Printing of Ferns鈥�, an 1862 albumen photogram.