Coffee Table Book of: Coral Reef (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Coral Reef is a large-format coffee table book: a coral reef, printed edge to edge, one picture to a page.

It begins with what a reef actually is. A coral head is not a plant and not a rock, it is a colony of small animals, each one a ring of tentacles around a mouth, and the stone is what they build underneath themselves.

Then the zones, because a reef is not one place. The flat is the harshest, hot, bright, briefly exposed, and only the squattest, toughest forms hold it. The slope is where the structure gets tall. And the bands of light that travel across the sand are the wave field focused by the surface, moving with the swell.

Then the residents and their arrangements. The false eyespot near a tail with the real eye hidden under a bar, so a strike lands at the wrong end. The fish that lives inside a sting because the sting does not fire against its mucus. The sea slug that eats stinging animals, stores their undischarged stings in its own skin, and advertises the fact in colour.

And then the close view, the polyp, the tentacle, the mouth, the skin, where the whole argument of the book sits: everything here is an animal, and the city is built by its tenants.

Short notes run through the book. Each one is about the reef rather than the picture, what the stone is made of, why the flat is the hard place to live, and why a bright colour is more often a warning than a display.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.