Presenting the spectacular double act of the photograph and the taxidermy specimen

Through psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s metapsychology, this project explores dialectical connections found between the photograph and the museum taxidermy specimen. The nineteenth-century museum illustrated what Tony Bennett, in his book, The Birth of the Museum, called the ‘exhibitionary complex’ – a public display of objects, previously hidden in private collections. As with Michel Foucault’s definition of heterotopia, the museum became an encapsulated institutional display of order, knowledge and spectacle. Museum displays and dioramas meticulously constructed by the conservationist’s craft of preservation, recreated archetypal ecological environments to present specimens defiant against decay and death. In pursuit of life, the Victorians explored preservation processes in both photographic and taxidermy crafts, attempting to defy death of both the physical object and the representational subject, thereby fashioning a cultural ‘celebration of death’. This project considers the probability that as a consequence of Victorian cultural and scientific endeavors, both the taxidermy specimen and the photograph, in a defiant double act, can simultaneously represent and defy the death-drive