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RATIONAL AMUSEMENTS

I like natural history museums, especially old-fashioned ones. I like the big oak cases, the dark corners, and the oddball particulars. I could present my photographs of these museums as a document of our changing attitudes toward representation and the natural world; but in truth, my interests are more personal. I come for the decrepit yak family, the gibbon's skeleton that appears to dance above severed hands, and the peculiar aesthetic logic of a diorama background painted in an impressionist style. Admittedly, I have a tendency to anthropomorphize the exhibits. I find expression in a rhino's glass eye and sympathize with hedgehogs caught in mid-scurry, trapped forever on a small red shelf.

Emmet Gowin wrote, "the gift of a landscape photograph [is] that the heart finds a place to stand." I repeat this not because I think it directly describes my own work but because it points to a fundamental difference. Despite the sentimental comforts of taxidermy, my own pictures convey no such certainty. Long dead yet eternally poised for action, the animals are figures without a ground, imprisoned in dizzying reflections, violent colors, flat landscapes, and time. Gawked at by tourists and leered at by predators, they float in a nether world between past and present, stasis and motion, life and death.

All Images and Text © Thomas Birtwistle 2008.
All Rights Reserved.