This is Frank Grießhammer’s personal collection of adapters. See more at his Adapter Museum online.

Frank Grießhammer was born in 1983, and has studied in Saarbrücken, Florence and The Hague. He graduated in 2008 in communications design from HBKsaar, with the thesis project Kiosk Fonts, a platform for student writing projects. (Linotype.com)

First spotted via Stüff Stuff.

“This image, Chip Clark’s most requested photo, shows Roxie Laybourne, Smithsonian research associate, in front, with Birds Division collections staff members Beth Ann Sabo, James Dean, Bonnie Farmer, and Dawn Arculus, in 1992. The Museum holds the largest collection of vertebrate specimens in the world, with over 5.8 million specimens representing fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Photo by Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution” (more)

About Chip Clark:

“Chip Clark came to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in 1973, with a degree in biology and an interest in photography. He has been a photographer on staff ever since, documenting thousands of specimens and exhibits, and accompanying scientists on research trips around the world. He has photographed everything from dinosaurs and mummies to diamonds, butterflies, and, of course, his fellow staff members. In the field he has photographed in caves in Jamaica, the rainforest in Peru, the coral reefs in Belize, and on the ocean floor in a deep-sea submersible off the Bahamas. He thrives on the challenges of photographing the natural world in its environment, no matter what the conditions.” (“Chip Clark: Museum Photographer for More Than Thirty-Five Years”)

“Animal Logic: Photography and Installation by Richard Barnes presents a mid-career survey of the work of acclaimed New York and San Francisco-based photographer Richard Barnes. Barnes’s work looks critically at both the natural world and the ways in which we attempt to institutionalize and classify nature within museums.” (from the Cranbrook Art Museum website).

Richard Barnes statement about this series is… coming soon.

I first became aware of the Dioramas series via Modcult.

See more of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s dioramas on his officiel website. Artist’s statement:

“Upon first arriving in New York in 1974, I did the tourist thing. Eventually I visited the Natural History Museum, where I made a curious discovery: the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I’d found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”

PBS website has a page about Hiroshi Sugimoto offering multiple videos, interviews, bio, slideshow, etc. He was featured in the episode “memory” during the third season of PBS’s ongoing series Art In The Twenty-First Century. You can watch the whole episode online.

Previously on Skandalon

Original caption: “Mounting Timber Wolf-Burlap, saturated in liquid plaster of paris is used to cover skeleton to form a base or armature on which to model in clay.”

American Museum of Natural History Library / Picturing the Museum: “Display case showing detail of The Skeleton from Fish to Man (III)”, photo by Allen, 1932, New York, NY.

American Museum of Natural History Library / Picturing the Museum: “Museum staff with fossil shark jaws under restoration”, photo by H.S. Rice, January 1927, New York, NY.

American Museum of Natural History Library / Picturing the Museum: “Large Male Gorilla, Gorilla Group”, photo by Charles H. Coles, November 1936, New York, NY.

American Museum of Natural History Library / Picturing the Museum: “Museum workman posing with Mastadon skeleton mounted for display”, photo by A.E. Anderson, date unknown, New York, NY.

About the collection: “Solidly based on the Museum’s scientific exploration and research, AMNH educators, librarians and exhibition specialists have labored to make the knowledge and wonder of the natural world available to the public. Their efforts and those of their successors were, in turn, documented by museum staff and other photographers.” (Read more).