Richard Barnes: Animal Logic

In this new body of work, San Francisco–based photographer Richard Barnes continues his exploration of the way humans collect, classify, value, contextualize and display artifacts in an institutional setting, and how presentation methods have evolved over the centuries.

For the last 10 years Barnes’ work has followed the trajectory of objects from burial ground to museum collections, culminating here with images from some of the oldest natural history museums in the world. Barnes recently discovered and photographed several rare disarticulated or “exploded” animal skulls.

In the 1850s, Claude Beauchene developed a method of separating skull bones along the suture lines as an aid to scientific research. Mounted on elaborate stands, the skulls are reminiscent of early arrested motion studies by such photographers as Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton. Barnes’ images reveal the fetishized aspects of these strange and fascinating objects, caught in a state of frozen entropy.

Other photographs in the exhibition include animal skeletons from the storage rooms of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy in Paris. Like the disarticulated skulls, these images are elemental and sculptural, exposing the sublime architecture of the body. Color photographs of animal exhibits from the Peabody Museum at Yale University, the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the Smithsonian, and other museums add further layers of complexity, inquiry, and oddity to Barnes’ on-going investigation of the history of display.