It’s a small world.

Naturalists of the 18th and 19th Century sought to record what they saw with drawings and paintings of great detail and precision. Although the accompanying text or title plate would contain information there was often nothing else within the image which gave any immediate reference to scale. Joseph Banks and Ernst Haeckel provided rich source material for this type of work. In photography the works of Karl Blossfeldt followed a similar pattern, seemingly drawing inspiration from this cataloguing of plants.

In the 2oth Century the work of Edward Weston, in particular his natural studies, again seemed to play with the notions of scale and the sometimes abstract qualities of nature when photographed against a neutral background, and without context. Having noted that Blossfeldt appeared to have taken the majority of his photographs in weak natural light, the small world images were my attempt to undertake something similar, using only the early morning light coming through my loft windows…

 

Small World II. Image copyright John Callaway (2009)

Here’s a link to another image from the series