Collections 92-06 by Camille Solyagua
Nazraeli Press, 2006. Available online at Amazon.com.

I won't tell you how bothered I am by this collection. Or how I've sat it on my shelf and desk for a month, flipping the terrible pages only to return again, as one does to an accident in their mind, the images of jarred human bodies. In fact, just last week, I placed "Plate 61" on the document camera in the composition class I teach and had my students worry over in words, as I have, how to put a head in a specimen jar into prose. A student gasped. One or two groaned. A third made me give him the book to look through, to finger these images up close.

Collections 92-06 is Camille Solyagua's art over a fifteen year period, presenting viewers her fascination with the natural world, science, and how it becomes rendered into beauty. Some of these are tranquil-flowers, dragonflies, a lily in a bell jar. Many are what you'd expect to find on a trip to a natural history museum or zoo-jelly fish, pollen, reptiles. And indeed Solyagua worked in the archive room in the natural history museum of Paris cataloguing what the scientific world captured in the late nineteenth century to today. {quotes}Using traditional photography, rather than digital, she labored for a decade to turn the negatives into vignettes, poems, a storyboard of truths.{/quotes}

And perhaps it is my age that makes me hurry through the sea horses, a print of twenty-one insect wings, and too many birds, to the bizarre. The mammals in formaldehyde. Often young, frequently missing some of the liquid that kept them, that made them, that gives them to us as evidence of what we thought of them, then. Tiger babies. A monkey head, its ear out of the liquid. A human arm. A skeleton of conjoined twins. A tailed infant. I am struck by what we seem to need to do when we study. And how it becomes not a study outward, but a study in.

Collections 92-06 is a brilliant collections of photos. One I'm not even sure I want to admit that I like. But I do. Oh I do.

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