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.