| Maggs has photographed every colour plate from the 1821 book 'Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, arranged as to render it highly useful to the arts and sciences.’ These plates depict a series of charts showing a wide range of colours occurring in the natural world. Beside each colour is a descriptive text explaining how the pigments occur in nature, under the headings, Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral.
The 110 colours documented in the book became a system for describing and classifying the natural kingdom. Maggs has used photography to document this book, which was in turn, originally used as a method of describing something before photography was invented.
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