TAXONOMY: DAN WINTERS

The lede to an article in NPR's The Picture Show about Dan Winters' new book "Periodical Photographs" makes a correlation between photography and natural science (specifically taxonomy and entomology). 

If Dan Winters hadn't discovered photography, he might have been an entomologist. Growing up in rural California, his Steinbeckian youth was defined by bugs, 4-H and science fair success, among many things. It was in 4-H, actually, that he was first introduced to photography. Now, years later, he concludes that portrait photography is not a far cry from his earlier scientific studies. "Shooting portraits of people is like taxonomy," he says. "I'm documenting [the] physical self."

I appreciate that this reference comes in the context of the image below:

The Hymenoptera Box of the Late George Merriken, Rancher, Citrus Grower, and Amateur Entomologist, Fillmore, Calif., July 22, 2000 By Dan Winters

Why can't a collection, model trains, a collection of sneakers (or in this case a case of Hymenopterae) be a portrait of a person? In daily interaction a person's real passions & interests rarely become evident. Often a successful portrait is one where the subject lets slip a little dose of the tiny characteristic or quality that sets them apart from the myriad others like them. I wish this were the cover of Periodical Photographs because what makes it interesting is not that there are many bees in a box, but all the tiny differences between genera.