dormer-durling
photographer

DRAGONS & SNAKESTONES

Mary Anning, born 1799, was a fossil hunter and palaeontologist from Lyme Regis, UK. Her discoveries and insights contributed to the identification and classification of a wide range of prehistoric life and changed scientific understanding of the history of the Earth.As a woman born to a poor family, she was denied fellowship of the scientific communities of the day and her work was often credited to the men that dominated the field.

In recent years her story has become well-known, particularly around the broader historic social injustices that her case highlights, yet information and evidence about her is fragmentary; a handful of letters and notebooks which reveal the extent of her knowledge and glimpses into her state of mind.

Today she is acknowledged in the museums and collections that hold her work, though often credited as a collector, rather than the field palaeontologist and scientific thinker that she was. In a letter written in 1844 – fifteen years before the publication of ‘On the Origin of Species’ – she anticipates the fundamental basis of Darwin’s theory of evolution

‘…from what little I have seen of the fossil World and Natural History, I think the connection or analogy between the creatures of the former and present World excepting as to size, much greater than generally is supposed...’

Whilst figuring out how to photograph her original specimens I looked closely for areas that I felt would have interested her, details she would have noticed as she sat for days and hours, her trained eyes scanning their moonlike surfaces as she cleaned and prepared them for sale.

Later, as I sat in the lab cleaning the dust from the negatives, I felt a connection to her, an encounter in a visual space we had both occupied.I began looking for traces she left in this space, on the fossils I saw scratchings from her pick, on her correspondence and notebooks I looked to the movement of her pen on the surface of the paper; evidence of her thinking, intimate physical marks left behind by a remarkable woman.

the book 'dragons & snakestones' will be published in spring of 2021