Capturing Nature

A landmark visual exploration of nature printing, featuring 45 different techniques and hundreds of astonishing rare images.

Hailed as the earliest precursor to photography, nature printing is the practice of using impressions from the surface of a natural object such as leaves, flowering plants, ferns, seaweed, snakes, and more to produce an image. Author Matthew Zucker has spent decades curating the most extensive collection of nature prints ever assembled, with more than 13,000 images across 120 rare and seminal works, including journals, published books, unique manuscripts, American currency, and instructional texts related to nature printing from 1733 to 1902.

This gorgeous volume explores Zucker's collection, allowing readers to see these nature prints presented side by side for the first time and enabling unique comparisons while creating a visually stunning journey through the developments over a 150-year period in printing methods, including photography with examples of cyanotypes. The ultimate guide to nature printing, this is a beautiful reference work for scholars, artists, designers, botanists, and anyone interested in nature, botanical illustration, and printing.

Matthew Zucker founded Zucker Art Books in 2006 with the publication of Dieter Roth in Print: Artists' Books. With one foot anchored in antiquarian books, Matthew stepped with the other into contemporary books, continuing to publish commissioned artists' projects and multiples, as well as organizing focused exhibitions highlighting rare examples of an artist's output. He lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.

Pia Östlund is a Swedish researcher, writer, designer and printmaker based in London. Pia has revived a lost nature printing process not used since the nineteenth century to create intricate, lifelike images of plants on paper. Since 2001, she has been a consultant to Chelsea Physic Garden, London, and Oxford Botanic Garden.