
What Darwin Missed, Teil III
- Publisher
- Kominek Books
- Year
- 2024
- Specifications
- Hardcover
60 illustrations
Texts (ENG/GER) by Joan Fontcuberta, Rosa Russo and Christiane Stahl
First exhibited at Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung, Berlin 2024
What if Charles Darwin had discovered more species during the historic voyage of the Beagle? Would he have the same ideas about evolution that he had after studying the coral reefs? Or did the British naturalist skip any underwater revelations while exploring the Galapagos and Cocos (Keeling) Islands? In the 1830s, Darwin's interest in corals started his greatest scientific contribution. For Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955) science is a set of provisional truths, and those same coral reefs might hold the key to new findings. The Catalan photographer, curator, essayist and lecturer started following Darwin's footsteps in the Pacific and Indian Ocean, and soon found out about a failed scientific expedition to illustrate these corals. Alfred Ehrhardt was a German nature photographer, filmmaker and author of award-winning works about coral species. What Darwin missed (Teil III) not only brings Alfred Ehrhardt's legacy back to life, but also portrays unknown coral species through Fontcuberta's unique lens. His amazing images point to the tension between reality and fiction, or between natural and artificial. Almost a century after Darwin published his first study about coral reefs, the Hamburg Natural History Museum invited Alfred Ehrhardt to photograph its collection of corals. Their collaboration was about to continue with that new expedition to Galapagos and Cocos (Keeling) Islands. The outbreak of the war canceled their trip, and in 1943 the museum was destroyed in a conflagration.