Photographer Andrew Zuckerman took a moment longer than usual to look closely at a bean that was sprouting in his studio.
“There was this one bean that sort of had this incredibly elegant curve, and I thought, ‘God, that’s exactly like the flamingo from like 15 years ago,’” Zuckerman tells Mongabay in a video call. He took out an old photo he’d taken of a flamingo, set both side by side, and kept looking at the pair.
The connection set off a journey through his own archive of some 2,500 images, taken over the last 25 years, and culminated in his latest book, United Nature.
Zuckerman’s method for documenting the natural world involves taking several photos, shifting the focus slightly with every shot. A camera, like the human eye, can keep only a thin slice of a close-up subject in focus at once.
He then combines the sharpest details into a single image, a technique known as focus stacking. “I can use this optical tool, this technique, to give you something that your eyes can’t see,” Zuckerman says.
Unlikely connections emerged between seeds and birds, jellyfish and crystals; pairings that cut through shapes, colors, sizes, and textures. He says he tries to turn his brain off to do this work.
“No intellect, all feeling, all intuition, trying to get to a more primordial part of my response system where I could feel my way through something rather than think my way through something,” Zuckerman says.
“I began noticing these kinds of remarkable relationships between very different things [and] became very interested in what happens when normal categories fall away,” he says. “We’re living in such a disconnected moment, and attention and active looking and being able to have an encounter with something is more and more rare.”
One page of the book pairs an aquamarine crystal with a pale blue jellyfish. They share a similar color and translucent quality. One is soft, the other hard. And they come from completely different places on the planet.
“What they share is a kind of dependence on their environment,” Zuckerman says. A jellyfish can pump itself forward, but relies on tides and currents to move. The crystal emerges inside a host rock over millions of years, under enormous pressure.
“Living things have so much detail. There is so much going on in a living thing that the more you look at it and the more you spend time with it, the more it reveals its own sense of textures and forms and colors. And it just takes time,” he says.
Banner image: A sprouting bean and a flamingo. All images courtesy of Andrew Zuckerman.
