Monday, June 23, 2008

"Picturing the Museum: Education and Exhibition at The American Museum of Natural History" Online Exhibition!













The web exhibition "Picturing the Museum: Education and Exhibition at The American Museum of Natural History" has officially launched!!

The website features photographs spanning from the late 19th- to the late 20th-Century that pertain to exhibition and education history at the museum; all of the images exhibited reside in the vast pictorial archive of the American Museum of Natural History's research library.

As a scanner and retoucher on this project, I scanned in 8 X 10 glass negatives, 4 X 5 acetates, and everything inbetween. The images are not only stunningly beautiful, but also provide an amazing resource that has much to teach us about, among other things, the evolution of natural history exhibition methods, the development and fabrication of the beloved "habitat groups" (aka dioramas), and the changing messages that natural history museums choose to communicate to us.

Above is a sampling of just a very, very few of my favorites from the website; I could not post even a tenth of my favorites here! I urge you to visit the website yourself to peruse the full collection.

3 comments:

Mike Barnkob said...

The picture of the lungs and heart is simply amazing!

porter hovey said...

Really out of control! Really beautiful images.

Daisy Church said...

wow- STUNNING! Found your blog via Curious Expeditions via Boing Boing- what a fantastic post- thank you so much for sharing! such beautiful and inspiring imagery!!