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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines photographic states of capturing and revealing used in my research to better apprehend binary expressions of life, death and defiance of the photo-dermy concept, which emerged from explorations of the relationship between the photograph and a museum gallery of taxidermied dogs.

Paper long abstract:

There is something distinctly uncanny (unheimlich) about the museum taxidermy specimen in its representation of the living and the dead, none more so than the taxidermied domestic dog specimens on display at the Natural History Museum in Tring, England.

Through my research project, 'Dogs: An Inert State', I explored the relationship between the photograph and these taxidermied dogs - specifically their expressions of a Freudian double death-defiance, a manifestation of what I term the photo-dermy concept. This paper examines two photographic conditions, namely, capturing and revealing, which I applied in the making of these photographs to study more closely, how unseen traits such as death and defiance might be traced from the taxidermied referent to the photograph.

I was compelled to photograph these inert dog specimens as a way of apprehending their inertia and their defiance - their complex memetic nature defines them as one thing (dead), yet, they are also representative of something else (lifelikeness). The same could be said of the photograph, which essayist, Roland Barthes, describes as a perverse confusion between the Real and Live (1981, p79). Both taxidermy specimen and photograph are mutually ambiguous and equally complex. They both express binary expressions such as life-death, loss-return, the visible-unseen and the familiar-strange and I established the photo-dermy concept in my practice-research to enable an exploration of these traits.

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