Contribution short abstract:

In the nineteenth-century, carte-de-visite photo-albums elicited a collective experience. In sharing my own album and collection of handmade carte-de-visite albumen prints depicting damaged obsolete museum taxidermy specimens, I hope to evoke a tactile and haptic remembrance for the lost animal.

Contribution long abstract:

I have been exploring the relationship between the photograph and museum taxidermy specimen collections for fifteen years. I am interested in their ambiguity and complexity as material and metaphorical expressions of death, preservation, remembrance and defiance.

My project, On Transience: Memento Mori, studied damaged taxidermy specimens in storage at the Natural History Museum, London. The objective in creating a collection of photographic prints from this museum collection was to elicit a greater tactility as a form of haptic remembrance.

Using the nineteenth-century albumen print process I made small carte-de-visite portrait prints of the taxidermied specimens - the intimate fragility of the prints became a metaphor for the damaged status of these obsolete specimens.

The prints are experienced in a nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photo-album to emulate a haptic reverie of the time - an attempt to offer some recognition of the individual specimen as an embodied representation of the animal that once was. These nineteenth-century albums and prints were made, collected, circulated, shared and touched as a form of remembrance and emotional connection to that which was untouchable or lost. Through “an entanglement of touch and sight,” (Batchen, 2009, p86), this portrait album became an archive offering an individualised remembrance for these lost taxidermy specimens.

My contribution to this workshop is to share the carte-de-visite album with fellow participants to enable a discursive tactile and haptic visuality of these prints and encourage remembrance of these lost animals.

The project can be viewed here: https://acm-photo.com/portfolio/mori.