Word: museum
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Australia's early naturalists went to great lengths to get new specimens. For Robyn Stacey, shooting the wonders of the Macleay Museum's natural history collections took its own kind of intrepidity. She had to climb and re-climb the three flights of stairs to the museum's public gallery; crisscross Sydney to poke through storerooms; mount ladders to fetch preserving jars from high shelves; lie on floors to photograph specimens too fragile to be moved more than a meter from their cases. The sumptuous result, Museum (Cambridge University Press), provides the armchair-dwelling naturalist with a lift...
...True, the book - like the museum's public exhibits - represents a tiny fraction of the vast trove that Alexander Macleay and his son and nephew amassed in a century of obsessive collecting. But it will, Stacey hopes, give readers the kind of thrill she felt when she began opening the thin drawers of Macleay Snr's purpose-built cabinets, "and they're all full of butterflies. One's got all cream ones, the next is orange, then spotted ones, and you keep going, Wow. Oh, God. Look...
...Rich though they are in curiosities, the collections have real scientific clout. They include more than 10,000 types, the specimens used to name and describe new species, as well as examples of creatures now rare (Gilbert's potoroo) or extinct (the skeleton of a Tasmanian tiger). Museum pays tribute to the science, both in Hay's historical essay and in the careful notes on each photograph: "The discrepancy between the information given here and the label on the bird's stand reflects a taxonomic refinement...
...Museum is most of all, and rightly, an art book. The specimens are arranged on the black or white pages like jewels on velvet or silk, the feathers and insect wings, corals and shells as brilliant as when they were first pinned into cork-lined drawers or stowed in boxes and jars. Stacey, who shot with film and scanned the images into a computer, says she limited her digital intervention to boosting contrast or deep-etching outlines. "I'm trying to give the sense that it is there in front of you. It's not the actual object...
...often much closer than a museum-goer could ever be. On one spread we see butterflies or beetles arrayed by the dozen in a display drawer; the next might hold one or two of those specimens, captured with a macro lens at 10 or 20 times their size. If the artist on show here is Nature, the close-ups only increase one's awe. How many ways can you design the jaws of a beetle? How many possible patterns are there on a moth's wings? How can there be so many kinds of scales, from butterfly fuzzy to fish...