Purcell's first collaboration with Stephen Jay Gould, Illuminations (1986), features photographs of natural-history specimens chosen from the backrooms of collections like Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. The specimens are not arranged according to customary scientific groupings. Rather, they are displayed in alphabetical order, from albatross to zozymus, the sequencing used in part of this 16^th-century bestiary. Purcell and Gould suggest that systems of classification are personal and often mutable. The book becomes a space where an alternate system can hold sway.

In mining collections like Harvard's, Purcell plays up the aesthetic potential of scientific specimens. Here, for instance, she brings the eerie transparency of the bat to the fore with backlighting. The specimen becomes quasi-mythical, swimming through pools of light and shadow—though bats, of course, don't swim at all.