If what comes to mind when you think of seaweed is brownish slimy organisms that wash up on the beach, or the bright green stuff served with sushi in a Japanese restaurant, you will be astonished at all the colors, shapes, sizes and textures - the sheer beauty - of seaweed pictured in "An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed."
Seaweed becomes an artistic medium in this new book by photographer, writer and book designer Josie Iselin, who will give a talk and booksigning on June 24 at New London's Custom House Maritime Museum.
Iselin has authored six previous books including "Beach Stones," "Heart Stones" and "Beach: A Book of Treasure." She has a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard and an MFA from San Francisco State University. Her artwork is shown at galleries and museums throughout the U.S.
Iselin lives in San Francisco and spends summers in Maine, where she combed the beaches for the seaweed featured in the book - more than 200 specimens gathered in tidal pools on both coasts that she photographed using a flatbed scanner.
Both the art and science of seaweed fascinates Iselin, which she discussed in this recent Day interview.
Q. Why is seaweed such an overlooked aspect of ocean life? Why aren't people aware of the beauty and diversity of it?
A. For one thing, you can't hike out into a seaweed garden like the woods. You have to put on boots and be quite adventurous to meet the seaweed where it's at. I was introduced to it in California, where there's a lot more diversity of seaweed. Although there's beautiful seaweed on the East Coast, the diversity on the West Coast is probably three times as great. The challenge with the book was to make East Coast seaweeds as fabulous as those on the West Coast.
Q. What led you to using a flatbed scanner to capture the details and colors in this delicate form of sea life?
A. I started using my scanner many years ago, after graduate school, in 1994. I was mostly scanning objects around my house. I was home with young kids, which gave me the opportunity to keep making images because it was so immediate. I had lots of stones - I was an inveterate stone collector. That led to the beach stones book and I continued to make books and images of those things you find at the beach. One day I was out on the Duxbury Reef and I held a scrap of seaweed up to the sky, and was so blown away by the brilliant magenta, beautifully formed seaweed and sumptuousness of color, that I had to get that scrap back to my studio and onto my scanner.
The scanner allows me a couple of things. One is an incredible level of resolution. I can get in and capture not only the nuance of the detail, but it's very true to the actual colors. The scanner also forces me to get rid of scale. I look at these as portraits because once you strip away scale - there's no reference with stones or horizons or fish - and all the extraneous information, (the seaweed) can really live on its own, speak for itself.
Q. You capture both the art and science of seaweed in this book. Can you talk about that?
A. I'm trained completely and totally as an artist. I have no scientific training. But, I've been a sailor since I was very young, swam in oceans, hiked in mountains, and was keenly aware of nature. I think the act of looking very closely is very much the first act of the scientist. This is where art and science really come together ... the notion of looking closely, and then looking even more closely, and then asking the questions.
Q. Why is seaweed important to our "near shore" environment?
A. Seaweed is really important, as important as the plants are on land, as they are the primary producers - they produce oxygen, store carbon, create an immense amount of habitat for hundreds of creatures. Whether they're fish, invertebrates, the nurseries of the oceans, seaweed's importance is not to be underestimated.
Q. Is seaweed a threatened species?
A. Kelp on the Northern California coastline is in absolute dire distress. There's been a tropic cascade where a series of events have led to an overwhelming population of sea urchins and they eat kelp as do abalone and some other celled organisms. When natural predators of sea urchins go away, they decimate the kelp. I get very depressed. Nobody sees it; (it's) as if there were clear-cut forests along the entire coast of New England, but nobody sees it underwater.
We need to make people realize it's happening, (caused by) a bunch of natural and manmade things. One of my great passions is to make people love seaweed because what you love, you'll spend time thinking about, and think about the oceans.
"An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed" (Abrams, New York) by Josie Iselin is $17.95, illustrated.
