Review : Framed lives

Kate Salway’s photographs lay bare arrays of acquisitions in her Collectors’
Items (Wilderness, £12, ISBN 0 9528802 0 2). The book is introduced by
John Fowles, with an essay on collections by Salway and another by historian
Marina Benjamin asserting that collectors have played a role in turning nature
into a theme park. Trouble is the photographs are too literal: the bite of the
surreal in Rosalind Wolf Purcell’s pictures for a book with Stephen Jay Gould on
a similar theme (Finders, Keepers, 1992) brought that volume alive.