Vernacular/Nostalgia: behind the scenes at the museum

'I made a point of photographing the corridors, cabinets, shelves, and stores which held the museum’s more than 80million specimens.'

I recently came across a post from the Public Domain Review (you can expect them to feature again in future posts) about ‘a photographic survey of The Smithsonian (1890-1913)’.

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Welcome to Vernacular/Nostalgia, an occasional exploration of my creativity and curiosity practices in the form of photography, art, and archive finds.

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I thought it was brilliant because a) the survey images were printed in cyanotype, and b) the photographer, Thomas William Smillie, didn’t just survey artifacts and specimens, but some of the objects in which they were stored.

'A single drawer positioned delicately on a cloth-draped stool’. Image courtesy of Public Domain Review via Smithsonian Institute.

I worked at London’s Natural History Museum for four years, and for some reason (I’m not sure why, maybe something to do with how I find symmetry pleasing and my ‘everything in its place’ tendency), I was equally interested in the storage behind the scenes as I was in the exhibits on display.

So much so, that during my time there, I made a point of photographing the corridors, cabinets, shelves, and stores which held the museum’s more than 80million specimens.

These are some of those photos:

The view from the library balcony.

The entomology stores.

‘Wet specimens’ at the museum at Tring.

A long row of lovely cabinets full of drawers; I can’t remember now what they contained.

Draws containing butterflies requested by the Russian-born writer, Vladimir Nabokov, for a book he was working on in the 1960s called 'The Butterflies of Europe'. (The book was never completed.)

The butterflies Nabokov requested – he planned to photograph them to illustrate his book – are from the Nymphalidae and Hesperiidae families.

PS: Coincidentally,

Bailey @ Substack

posted a piece about Nabokov’s interest in butterflies in his

Art Dogs

newsletter last Friday, if you’d like to find out more.