“Photography elicits that madness, that hallucination of the other that allows the spectator, in a momentary jouissance, to enter into the spectacle, to commingle with the spectacle, to embrace, as it were, the spectral other or dying animal”
[Akira Mizuta Lippit]
This current project, On Transience: Memento Mori is a work-in-progress and continues my research into the preservative relationship between the photograph and the taxidermy specimen. The work explores life-death, the seen-unseen, loss-remembrance through damaged taxidermy specimens in storage at the Natural History Museum, London.
These portraits are produced as intimate and fragile 89 x 54mm carte-de-visite albumen prints and are presented and experienced in a 19th century photo-album. This representation draws the viewer in and provides a space for remembrance and the acknowledgement that these prints are signifiers of these specimens, of their forgotten-ness, of their death and of the impermanence of the print itself.
As this project is ongoing, more albumen photographs will be added as the project develops.
