After-Nature
After-Nature is a photographic inventory of natural history specimens held in museum storage. It is modelled on William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844), the book that first set photography to work as a way of cataloguing the world.
The photographs were made in the storage rooms of natural history collections, at the Western Australian Museum’s facility in Welshpool and at the Natural History Museum in Guildford. Most of a collection is never displayed. It sits wrapped and numbered, kept on the understanding that it may one day be needed.
The Pencil of Nature was the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs, issued in six parts between 1844 and 1846 with twenty-four plates. Talbot promised that the camera would record a multitude of minute details that no artist would take the trouble to copy. The series began as an inventory in that manner. The photographs here often do the opposite. The lens holds a small area sharp and lets the rest fall away.
An inventory records whatever is in front of it. These photographs give the plastic wrap and the accession number the same attention as the bone or the bird skin. In a drawer of bird skins no animal is visible, only labels and runs of numbers. The label stands in for the specimen, and the photograph stands in for the label.
André Malraux called this le musée imaginaire in 1947, translated into English as the museum without walls: a collection known through its copies. As the natural world recedes, more of it is known this way, through specimens kept out of sight and the photographs made of them.