"Museology": The Secret Life of Museum Exhibits

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week is the Museology series by Richard Ross, a lecturer at the University of Santa Barbara, in which he ironically displays exhibits from museum archives around the world, noting the bashfulness of a nude statue and the perplexity with which the antique bust looks at the stepladder, and the stuffed rhinoceros looks at visitor.

In this project, I ironically demonstrate the museums of natural history and art, or rather, their exhibits from an unexpected angle from which we usually do not see them. For example, in some cases it is as if the spirits of animals survived a taxidermist who turned them into an effigy - this is a mockery of the power of a man with a knife: the muzzle of a rhino filled with sawdust is skeptical looking through glass, unshakable in its grandeur. Around - the victims in the windows, frozen in motion, as if as a result of some cunning trick that creates the illusion of their goodness: the wild nature is ordered and domesticated.

Another joking situation is a classic nude sculpture, and it seems to be hiding from staring visitors in the museum corner. But the stuffed lions clashed in a fierce kitsch fight. But, of course, I put in such pictures a little more than just a desire to entertain and make the audience laugh: this is an attempt to change the predator and the prey, the observer and the object of observation in the museum and in the cultural context as a whole. Formally, this is a study of the traditional mechanism of classification and systematization of objects. And in fact, I travel around the world, studying the contents of the museum basements and storerooms, and show people what is often hidden from their eyes. This is a romantic adventure, and I feel like a successor to famous travelers and explorers in an age when, it would seem, everything is already known.