My grandmother’s seashell collection fills me with great joy. I think of her walking slowly on the beach, where the calm found in the confluence of sand and tide can be pocketed in the form of a bit of calcium carbonate.

Seashells are reminders—of people and places, of summer, of toes in the sand—more powerful than any snapshot.Their symmetries, spirals, and patterns are fascinating to gaze upon; their dialectical strength and fragility,  awesome to ponder. When we take the time to inspect our precious finds, they provoke so many questions about how they were made.

Working with Sandy Carlson to answer some of those questions has been a delight. Her depth of knowledge  is exhaustive. A walk on the beach with her turns into miles of insights about a mollusk’s behavior, all sparked by a shard of shell. Together we have sought to reveal shells’ mysteries by marrying keen observation with scientific explanation.

My job as photographer is simply to look closely. In doing so, I found magnificence in even the plainest of seashells. Instead of a camera, I use a flat-bed scanner, which splendidly captured the shells’ detail, nuance, and volume. It elicited a strength of form that was intoxicating to work with on the monitor and great fun to translate to the page.

As for Beach Stones and Leaves & Pods, I amassed the collection pictured here collaboratively. Most of this book’s subjects were found at the water’s edge. Friends and relatives contributed bowls full of shells and treasure. My aunt’s attic yielded my grandmother’s shells, which she collected over a lifetime of meandering along the shore of her beloved Pawley’s Island, in South Carolina. I also had the privilege of exploring the fossils and shells at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. I was not after the academy’s exotic specimens but the relatively common shells and fossils from around the world that would help illustrate shells’ astounding variety.

            I thank my fellow collectors for sharing their shells: Polly Saltonstall, Delphine Eberhart, Lisa Gross, Sandy Goroff, Alan Constant, Alison Mattoon, Mary Swanson, Kari McCabe, Katie Bishop-Manning, Claudia Scharff, Susan Evans and her family for their wonderful Tunisian fossils, Via Lambros, Janet Macomber, Elizabeth Corbus, and, always, Cathy Iselin. Also, Jean DeMouthe, Bob Van Syoc, Peter Roopnarian, and George Metz at the Academy. And I thank my aunt, Judy Cromwell, who so lovingly packed up my grandmother’s shells. The spirit of my grandmother, Fannie Brawley, who took great inspiration from and care with all things natural, has been hovering around my studio throughout the making of this book.

                                                                                                               JLI, January 2007