Christopher and I recentley went to New York City to document and explore the use of taxidermy in contemporary culture. Over the next months, I will be posting about the  the differing ways in which taxidermy is displayed out of the homes of noblemen and backwoods camps and into the everyday.

Our vist to The American Museum Of Natural History was long overdue, after much academic investigation and writing about the collection practices of Carl Ackley, the museum taxidermist who changed the face of natural history museums around the world. Natural history museums developed in the Nineteenth Century as storehouses of collections of products of nature. Museums organized and catalogued nature into taxonomies. However this changed with the collection and presentation practices of Carl Akeley, the forefather of museum taxidermy, and a pupil at Wards Natural Science Establishment. Akeley was the first exhibition designer and taxidermist to show detailed animal groupings in elaborately staged and painted natural habitats (Milgrom, 2010; Wonders, 1993; Haraway, 1984). Akeley employed melodramatic modes of exhibition that he described as “a peep-hole into the jungle” (Haraway, 1984; p. 29). At the American Museum of Natural History, preserved animals are exhibited in the context of moralistic displays. The stage is set with animals arranged as nuclear families, with mounts playing the roles of the brave, protective patriarch, the nurturing mother or the adoring child. (Wonders, 1993; Haraway, 1984). These painstaking constructions were not reflective actual knowledge of nature, but of a society that is instilling nature with it’s own mores and values.

Photos by Christopher Bennell

While walking the hallowed halls of this storehouse and protector of natural history I became uneasy with the collection practices of another era on display and the sublime scale of animal bodies (not to mention the human bodies) and the questionable ethics in obtaining them. The signage glorified the act of collecting – a euphemism for killing – of the animals. In contrast to the Field Museum in Chicago, AMNH did not acknowledge the diorama artists, taxidermists and conservationists that a museum needs to maintain a collection of this scale. It was the sublime scale all these once-living creatures placed behind glass – for the first time in my life I was made squeamish by death on display in a museum.