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Emily Stelling

Dr. Sterling

ENGL 1301

28 February 2017

The Biography of a Photographing Biologist

A whole world exists outside of urban life, and most people fail to think twice about it.

Thankfully, those driven to learn more about this world and the life on it still exist. Colin

Purrington is one of those people: a devoted and trained biologist. As a biologist, Colin studies

the diverse life around him, ranging from areas right outside his house, to countries overseas.

Along his journeys, he has captured photographs of many different plants, animals, fungi, and

insects, so that he may possibly identify them as well as understand them.

Colins passion for biology began through his father. Colins father (also a biologist)

exhibited an infectious love for the physical sciences. His interests were a large factor towards

what he did with his kids. During Colins childhood, his father would often pull over on the side

of a highway so that he could collect dead animals in the hopes of preserving their skulls.

Together, they would put the animal in a bag, then use flies, beetles, and bleach to clean off the

bones.

The first school Colin attended was a free alternative school called the Goodman

School, which his mother and her friends started in the 1970s, in East Lansing, Michigan. They

started it out of fear that public schools were damaging children by teaching them to behave and

think a certain way. Back then, Colin loved the school since they did not have to do anything
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they did not want to do. I could play all day outside, or paint, or whatever, he remembered.

Everyone seemed happy, and the teachers were all overeducated dreamers that envisioned a

better world.

Consequentially, Colin suffered from an inability to read or do simple math when he

began attending public school in third grade. This initiated teachers to label him intellectually

challenged, but before they could place him with intellectually disabled children, Colins mother

convinced them that he could overcome this handicap with extra help. It was strange being in a

class of peers where everyone could read and write, yet I had zero desire to do either, Colin

admitted. All I remember about that time was that my first book I read was The Hobbit. I still

have my word list my mom kept while I was learning.

After high school, Colin went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, as an undergraduate

before going to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, for a PhD in ecology and

evolutionary biology. He enjoyed Brown the most because he had a great advisor, a great office,

and made great friends. But loving Brown did not make the work there simple. Multiple times

during his PhD research, Colin had experiments fail due to disasters out of his power. The first

was Hurricane Bob, which washed away about a year of work [where] I was looking at how male

and female plants aged and died along the shore, he recollected. That was horrible, in part

because when a years effort is destroyed by a hurricane you wished it had a name more

menacing than Bob.

Another experiment failed after being trampled and tampered with by local mountain-

bikers, who swapped hundreds of plant tags, causing Colin to never recover their original

positions. But these failures, among others, did not stop him from continuing to do more research

projects. It in fact, it elicited his strategy of starting multiple experiments at once. Doing this did
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not prevent failures, but it indeed brought forth successes. I would have stayed in graduate

school longer if I could, Colin remarked fondly. Graduate school was fun because if I had an

idea, I could waltz over [to] the greenhouse and start a new experiment within the hour. More

broadly, I guess what saved me was a sense of humor about it all, mixed with an optimism that

theres always tomorrow.

Colin eventually moved on to work as a postdoctoral scholar, starting at Washington

University and ending up at University of Chicago. He started teaching as an Associates

Professor at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, in 1997 over evolutionary

biology. He taught there for 14 years, and in between that time he practiced photography and

eventually generated his own website: colinpurrington.com. He originally began practicing after

one of his mentors in high school helped him purchase his first camera. She drove me to a

camera store and picked out [some] used camera equipment that she approved of, Colin said.

That got me started, and Ive been a tad obsessed with it ever since.

Colin obsession eventually brought him to want a place to keep his photos. After years of

being using Flickr, he finally got annoyed with it and started working on his own website. His

website brought him success in selling a few photos for textbooks and he also uses it as a

platform for his advice to students that he made during his stay at Swarthmore College. His

website has grown larger over the years, and for every photo he posts of an organism, he tries to

identify as well as inform viewers about it.

Although he is a trained biologist, naming a species does not always come easily for

Colin. For most species, the information he provides comes from what he finds in guidebooks

and on web pages. While a common species is easier to identify, sometimes the trickier ones

bring him to narrowing them down to a general category and then emailing a friend who might
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know more. The process can take up to a year, and sometimes he will just post a photograph as

unknown. Photography is the way I learn about organisms these days, Colin informed. [A]

single photograph can be a wonderful rabbit hole to learning about things Id never heard about.

Colins photography has never been limited to what can be seen in a backyard or in the

woods next to a highway. Over the years, Colin has been able to travel to Costa Rica, Mexico,

Vietnam, Thailand, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Galapagos islands. During his many journeys,

he has taken photos of uncommon species and learned numerous things about them. His favorite

place happened to be the Galapagos islands, the same place Charles Darwin initiated his

hypothesis (now a theory) on evolution. After teaching about the Galapagos for decades, it felt

like a dream come true to be there.

There are other places Colin would like to travel, like a cave in Waitomo, New Zealand

that has bioluminescent flies that hang from gooey strands, or Iceland, where the Northern Lights

can be seen clearer than in the United States. He would also love to get a used camera to take

ultraviolet images of flowers so that they may look, as Colin put it, relevant to how bees see the

world. Today, Colin spends his time at home caring for his kids and pets, but he may one day

see these places and obtain his desired camera.

Colins dedication to biology and the life around him is inspiring. Like Darwin, he

becomes obsessively curious about everything he sees. I think about that quality [of Darwin] a

lot, Colin said. When I see an organism, I think to myself that there is undoubtedly a story

there if I could just figure it out. And through his knowledge and photography, he tries to do

just that.
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Works Cited

Purrington, Colin. Personal interview. 23 February 2017.

Purrington, Colin. Colin Purrington. colinpurrington.com. Accessed 9 March 2017.