Cultures of Natural History

More Work For Mother [review]

2011-10-10T11:01:00.001-07:00

by Ruth Schwartz Cohan,

Centre & Periphery

2011-09-06T16:44:00.000-07:00

Portugal is in the geographical periphery of Europe, occupying most of the oceanic coastal line of the Iberian Peninsula. Its geological characteristics, flora and fauna are shared with Europe's Mediterranean region. It is its position as the Western tip of the European continent that puts Portugal (and Sagres) in the privileged spatial position for the maritime expansion in the 15th-17th century, but it is also its peripheral situation that instils a somewhat subservient place in relation with 18^th-19^th-20^th century European centres. Between a rock and a hard place, Portuguese historiography developed in the 20^th century shows mixed feelings about our colonial past.

What does it mean then to be in the centre or in the periphery of History?

How does one person, city or nation get to be in the centre of the scientific narratives? But, more to the point, what does it mean for the scientic knowledge being produced or being assimilated?

Ich Hab' Noch Einen Koffer In Berlin

2011-05-15T12:39:00.000-07:00

OLD Log

Januar 2010
In about a month I will be visiting some Natural History collections and attending to the Symposium: Universitätsmuseen und –sammlungen im Hochschulalltag. Aufgaben – Konzepte – Perspektiven
While at the Humboldt U., I hope to be able to visit some archives in order to get a glimpse of what was Berlin like in the 1860's, when Barbosa du Bocage, Professor of the Polytechnic School and director of the zoological (and anthropological) collections and museum, was their correspondent.
ps: In the rough - and at the same time sweet - voice of Marlene Dietrich, Berlin already seems a little bit nearer...

NEW Log

May 2011

I did in fact visit the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften archives whilst in Berlin last year and I manage to draw some (few) but interesting informations. Mostly on the difficulties of maintaining contact inbetween academies (Lisboa-Berlin). Specially during the second world war, when Lisboa quite stubbornly held a history congress in 1940 and invited delegations from all over europe. Should come as no surprise that the mail invitations didn't really get to the academy in Berlin on time. (or to anywhere else, for that matter).

2011's First Eclipse

2011-01-04T01:42:00.000-08:00

I got up to see the partial Eclipse today. But turns out this morning is "clouded". It truly amazes me every time I read about astronomical observations because of the chance factor it implies - weather wise in the least.
Reading about Galileo's depictions of his moon sighting, for example, I can't help but reflect on how much on scientific 'progress' was 'pushed' by intuition and plain curiosity and inquisitiveness.
By the way, Newton's birthday today - in Gregorian terms, at least - I wonder how fantastic it was to live through international scientific epistolary relationships back in the days of calendar difficulties.

(excerpt) Exhibition «La Fabrique des Images» Quai Branly, 18th May 2010

2010-08-12T18:02:00.000-07:00

[more here:
http://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/programmation/expositions/a-l-affiche/la-fabrique-des-images.html]
I selected these texts to propose some reflections on the tensions of WHAT IS NATURE?

ººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººººº

Many peoples in Europe until the Renaissance, in the Far East, in West Africa, in the Andes or in Mexico see the occupants of the cosmos and their components as all different from each other. This is why they strive to find relationships among all these singularities, in order to establish some kind of structure and permanence in their lived world. Given the role played here by analogical thought, we may call analogism this way of combining moral discontinuities and physical discontinuities.

Australian Aborigines think that, despite their differences in form, certain humans and certain species of animial and plants within a given group share the same essence, the same substances, and the same dispositions accruing from an original totem. Because of its composition and the qualities that define it, each set of humans and non-humans is different from the other. We can call totemism this way of highlighting the moral continuities and physical continuities between humans and non-humans.

In certain regions of the word, animals and plants are seen to have an inner self, similar to that of humans. Under their fur, their feathers, their leaves, they are people like us. But each species, including different human tribes, is distinct from the other in its physical form and in the type of activity that its body permits. This way of combining moral continuity and physical discontinuities can be called animism.

For some centuries in the West, we have distinguished humans from the rest of the world’s entities because they are the only ones, we say, to have an inner self, a mind, a conscience. But we also see humans as beings of nature since they share certain physical characteristics with all non-humans, including inanimate objects. Because the idea of nature plays a central role in articulating moral discontinuity with physical continuities, this configuration can be called naturalism.

Naturalism as a vision of the world is the inverse of animism. It is not by virtue of their body but because of their mind that humans differ from non-humans. It is also because of shared ideas and values that they differ from each other as members of distinct cultures. As for the physical dimension of humans, it is ruled by the same laws of other organisms, or even of inorganic objects; it doesn’t make of them a species apart.

Born in Europe only a few centuries ago, this way of thinking expressed itself in images which figure simultaneously the inner self specific to each human and the physical continuity of beings and things in space. Over the course of time, however, notably with scientific photography, human subjectivity disappears from images; it becomes a physical parameter, a simple expression of biological mechanisms.

The beauty of the everyday

In Holland, in the 17^th century, a type of painting was born that conferred on the material world and its banality a peaceful beauty and a dignity that no one had shown before. The everyday took precedence over the sublime, mystery was now expressed in ordinary life. The subjectivity of humans was now depicted in situations that no longer pertained to the history common to Christian cultures, but to a moral environment more complex to decode. The ambiguous behaviour of these tranquil citizens shows that the inner self has not disappeared, but it is now subordinate to the visible encounter of subjectivities within the relationships depicted. We see this tenderness for reality in landscapes and still-lives, where time is suspended and the concern for faithful details transcends former aesthetic and religious constraints.

Naturalization on the move

The progressive liberation of images from the canons of aesthetics and symbolic meanings finds its expression, in the 18^th century, in a split between two manners of representing the human body: on the one hand, ‘peintres galants’ such as Watteau, Boucher or Fragonard depicted the games of love and sentiment in a quest for the ideal and for style. On the other hand, a score of little-known mechanics, anatomists and illustrators, following Descartes and la Mettrie, applied themselves to building automata that would emulate life, to making anatomical figures that would unveil the physical aspect of humans, and to reproducing with exactitude the flora and fauna of far-away places. In being faithful to Nature, they freed themselves from the representation of interiority in favour of intelligible parameters that could be visually rendered.

The Physical world in and of itself

Over the course of the last two centuries, the Renaissance ideal of canonical beauty has only rarely returned to the artistic scene. With the development of photography, with the Impressioinists, the image ceased to be an expression of a model and became instead a mere sensible trace.

The techniques of capture and reproduction of previously invisible dimensinos of corporal materiality (chronophotography, X-ray, MRI) amplified the impression that the inner self had disappeared from the human body. After six centuries of experimentation with images, naturalism is about to reduce one of its two dimensions to the other, by displaying the mind in its materiality. The ineffable self has become something that can be represented as an imprint and no longer as a copy of an ideal model.

Travelling Specimens

2010-05-04T09:38:00.000-07:00

A curator is always worried whenever an object or a part of 'his/hers' collection is due for transportation or lending to other institutions. Strict rules have to be observed and the risks are always high.

Natural History specimens are especially prone to travelling between places. Either because they were 'collected' somewhere else, or because they are exchanged between museums as a specific trade that goes on between Natural History institutions - or when they are being "robbed" from their natural institution and taken for other museums, as happened in Portugal during the French invasion around 1808, but that's another narrative still to be explored.

A different occasion for moving collections around is when you have to change the physical building where they are being kept (even if not open to the public). This happened two times with the main nucleus of the Natural History collections in Lisbon:

In Lisbon the collections were once in the Palace in Ajuda (where they were seen and “requested” by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire – Muséum Paris), at the Academy of Sciences (where they opened to the public as Museu Nacional), and at the Polytechnic School where they were moved to serve the purpose of scientific education.

Studying those displacements promises to be very useful for the biography of these collections as these were primary moments for assessment of the existing catalogues.

I for one would really like to know how was a huge block of copper (presumably weighing more than two thousand pounds) transported from Brazil into Ajuda, and then to the Polytechnic School where it stands today. I don't have images of that, but I just found this one at the online photo archive of Lisboa.

This photo can be found at the Arquivo Fotográfico Municipal de Lisboa @ http://arquivomunicipal.cm-lisboa.pt/
Transporting a Dragon Tree (Dracaena drago) to the Botanical Garden of Ajuda.
Dated 1911 by Benoliel, Joshua, 1873-1932

reading manuscripts and networked relationships

2010-04-20T17:10:00.000-07:00

In order to pursue the museum-desk-naturalist-thesis, I'm writing the full transcripts of manuscripts* of letters from or sent to Professor Barboza du Bocage - Director of the Zoological Section of the «Museu Nacional», concerning the teaching and scientific collections housed at the Escola Politécnica, Lisbon. With this I try to argue that this museum in Lisbon was not only a port in which to keep specimens but, beginning with Bocage's contribute, is part of the european networks between museum directors, scientists, taxidermists, etc, that is unveiling new scientific knowledge on the animal kingdom in the late 19th century.
I have collected dozens of letters of the period from 1859 to 1899, that I am now analysing further for a paper to present in Barcelona next November.

*from the Historical Archives at the Science Museum and the National Natural History Museu in Lisbon (former Escola Politécnica)

Arquivos e Memórias

2010-01-04T16:16:00.000-08:00

Today I finally began to study natural history museums and history of science fulltime (whilst and on the same time being unemployed). I am currently dedicated to the Historical Archives of the Zoological and Antropological Department at the National Natural History Museum, Lisbon.
I have been bewitched since 2006 by the collections of this department - and of all natural history museums -, its material culture and its meanings that are so much more close to culture and politics than they are to science.
Until now I gathered a lot of data and came across some some times crazy peculiarities. Now that I am unemployed I'll start writing and hopefully publishing some of the stories I found underlying in the rooms, the walls, the corridors and the objects that are the history of this museum.

In the Historical Archive, I found a lot of interesting manuscripts, not about science, but rather about the relationships between professors and the government, or between the museum directors and their correspondents abroad over the last 150 years. The history of the collections goes further back in history, but I have maintained a special interest in the biography of these collections since they came into the building they still are today. This building is the old Polytechnical School of Lisbon, at the time that it was working at full speed this was one of the main education sites in Lisbon. More on that later on.

In 2008, I gathered all the information I could get from this Historical Archive on the exhibitions practices at the Zoology and Antropology Section of the Polytechnical School (later this section is called Museu Bocage in tribute to its first director - I rather like this designation, and I will be using it often as a substitute for the average of 7 words you need to say before anyone can understand what you are talking about. Its rather confusing that a part of the collections in the national museum may also be addressed as a museum, but that's what and how it was).
There isn't much precise data to be found in this historic archive [AHMB - Arquivo Histórico do Museu Bocage] on exhibitions, because there weren't any exhibitions until very recently, okay in the last 150 years there were a lot of exhibition rooms but were they visited? Not as such and even when opened to the public, not very often.
I could also gather from some Lisbon Guides from the 19th century and early 20th century that this museum in the university was open to the public of Lisbon only one day per week, thursdays it seems, continuing the tradition set by the Science Academy Museum [same collections, a few years earlier], which also opened on thurdays if at all.

So the university museum paradigm is also at play here. Rooms filled with magnificent naturalized mammals or drawers filled with rocks and crystals existed. Even display cases existed. But for the main purpose of the ongoing study of the natural world.

(to be continued)

chimp in a strange position

2009-12-19T13:09:00.000-08:00

This poor monkey, tipped over like that on a closed museum display reminds me of how much life natural history 'objects' have and how it is ignored most of the times... This monkey was set in a specific position by its taxidermist maker. Holding a branch like 'as if' it were on the jungle. Opening his mouth 'as if' he's about to say/yell something at the visitor. This is an impressive mount. Correction, this was an impressive mount. It just can't be left at ground level inside the display! Losing all its impressive power on the direct 'regard' to the visitor this is now just an old mount of a monkey tilted back in its own support. Or is it?

'behind the scenes'

2009-10-27T14:50:00.000-07:00

'behind the scenes'

Almost five years ago I strolled for the first time through the corridors of the Zoological department of the National Natural History Museum, Lisboa. I went there in order to work with the then recent Education Office at the Department of Zoology and Anthropology. Little did I know, that soon after I would naturally venture into Museum Studies. And that's why when I saw the didactical models by Docteur Auzoux in the corridors, spare rooms and later on even some on display I had to ask someone about them.
The National Natural History Museum stands for more than 150 years of Science Education in Portugal. The Zoological Department is nowadays still called specifically «Museu Bocage» due to its first regent professor and its first collections organizer: José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage (1823-1907). These historically rich collections suffered a devastating fire in 1978, and the Zoology department had to be rebuilt. Still not everything burned down. There are still objects without scientific value that may help for a better understanding of Science representations in Portugal since the nineteenth century. There is an under -explored Archive with manuscripts, receipts and notes that go back to Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira's heritage.
'material culture'
When organizing the collections and the teaching Zoological Laboratory, Bocage had to travel to Europe in order to gather what he felt was most important with the little budget he had. On at least one of his trips in 1859, he bought some didactical models which are still in the museum today. More on those objects later...

entre a antiga escola e o antigo museu

2008-08-12T04:03:00.000-07:00

Entre a antiga Escola e o antigo Museu ficava este corredor. Hoje, mesmo em Agosto, está de novo aberto ao público por ocasiao da exposição temporária «Nullius» [boletim noticias da politécnica]. Como muitas outras preciosidades destes espaços parece-me difícil de datar, mas os expositores de parede, concerteza serviam para publicar notas entre alunos e professores e departamentos da Escola Politechnica do final do século XIX / inícios do século XX. As cadeiras pertenceriam talvez a salas de aula. Gostava de ver o complexo museológico da politécnica reabilitar estes e outros equipamentos do antigo edifício como novos objectos de colecção; com o estatuto de objecto de museu.

o corredor peripatético da politécnica

2008-06-03T06:59:00.000-07:00

2008-06-02T11:27:00.001-07:00

The Micheletti Award for the most promising technical or industrial museum among the current year’s candidates goes, unusually, to a science museum this year. The Science Museum at the University of Coimbra in Portugal impressed the judges with its sensitively restored and designed neoclassical Laboratorio Chimico. With its theme of ‘secrets of life and matter’ the museum has crossed scientific discipline-lines and the integration of the historic building and objects with thoughtfully chosen computer interactives and experiments has proved very successful. Add to this a very varied programme of activities and a high standard of publications, and the resulting experience for visitors is excellent.
museu da ciência da universidade de coimbra

Does Flying Cost The Earth?

2008-05-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

London's Science Museum Exhibition

The Museums' way of providing a better informed public opinion on global issues.

V NaMu meeting

2008-05-28T03:17:00.000-07:00

Re-imagining the National Museum: Traditional Institutions in an era of technological change
16-18th June @ Leicester University

«The European Commission's research frameworks have funded projects which utilise culture as the subject matter for technological investigation and development of a knowledge-based society. The dream of an integrated knowledge space drawing particularly upon the wealth of material held in national institutions raises many issues for these institutions. If access to a nation's culture becomes international, does the national museum inevitably justify the claim of being a 'universal (world/global) museum'? In the borderless world of networked media, what distinguishes a national museum? Does a transformation take place? How will the concept of the national museum develop beyond the simple representation of existing ideas and collections? How do new information architectures on the web reconstitute the old architectures of Europe's national museums?»

2008-05-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

2008-05-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

Plantes de Caconda

2008-05-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

2008-05-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

Welwitsch

2008-05-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

Bloco de Cobre Nativo

2008-05-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

2008-05-06T09:26:00.001-07:00

Busto de JVB duBocage

2008-05-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

2008-05-02T06:57:00.000-07:00

2008-05-02T06:49:00.000-07:00

2008-05-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

2008-05-02T06:43:00.000-07:00

2008-05-02T05:36:00.000-07:00

Presentation and Representation. Nature and Culture.

2008-04-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

The following was presented as a poster in the «nature behind glass: historical and theoretical perspectives on natural science collections», manchester museum, sep. 2007:

Diorama (Gr.) describes the act of seeing - through.
The diorama is examined here as a prevailing visual display and a specific museological device of a classical Natural History Museum. It is a device that simultaneously displays nature and its representations according to symbolic values. It is both a presentation and a representation of scientific contents. It is part of the history of the natural history museum as well as it is part of the history of knowledge in natural sciences. Each field of knowledge builds a specific vocabulary for producing and presenting its finds and concepts. The modern museum, along with the modern paradigm, was above all a visual construct. As such, what are the ways through which the natural history museum may present itself nowadays? As the diorama loses its power and influence in the modes of display available, how should museums relate to it and to classic taxidermy techniques?

THE MODERN EPISTÉME

As the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries foundation of knowledge unfolds, the modern concept of the Museum develops as a visual display of cultural enlightenment. The Natural History Museum is thus the expected result of a reorganization of the Wunderkammmer, displaying the latest ideas about the natural world, and the new classificatory science.

Reconfigurating scientific knowledge, this new place of literacy - the natural history museum - presents a very specific view on what defines a realistic representation of nature. The illusionist appeal allowed by the late eighteenth century devices and technology produced a development of such structures as those of the Panorama and the Diorama, both means of presenting and representing environments and sensory experiences to the bourgeois masses.

DIORAMA ART

Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre, inventor of the Daguerreotype, physicist and landscape painter; and Charles-Marie Bouton, open to the Parisian public in 1822 an exhibition entitled “Diorama”, where both wish to present «un monument d'exposition d'effets de peinture» [Wood, 1993]. Through the following twenty years they presented more than twenty different vistas and scenarios of monuments and landscapes in this fashion. It is supposed to have drawn ca. 80.000 visitors, only between 1822 and 1830 [Wood, 1997]. Later on some of these monumental paintings were to be sold and exhibited also in London's Regent's Park, this becoming then a tale of two cities. In both cases the diorama presentations included paintings of massive

scale opaque and translucent, where the scenic effects are played through an ingenious light design, whilst the spectators are kept in the darkness. This being the origin of this specific illusionist display, the diorama may be defined as a three-dimensional representation, or scale model of a landscape designed to visually present an historic event, an urban scenario or the natural world settings for educational and entertainment purposes we find in the Natural History Museum.

The presentation and re-presentation of nature and the real inside the museum has had different designs related with the epistemological history of scientific knowledge. A museum, or an exhibition, incorporates in itself the paradigm of a prevailing visual knowledge of the world in the western society. The visible, the view and the viewed are of utmost importance in the display devices in the museum.

Museological structures such as the diorama show an impressive knowledge about design, physics and the visual and light phenomena. Nevertheless, underlying is also an illusionist driving force possibly rooted in the baroque fantasy paintings and 'trompe l'oeil' theatre settings whose canvases were also made curvy in order to achieve a pictorial perspective apparition. On the other hand, the extraordinary development of taxidermy techniques derives from a concept of realistic, although deceiving, depiction of nature.

NATURALISM AND TAXIDERMY

The natural history museum is dedicated to scientific research and the consequent popularization of scientific knowledge through exhibits which may cause curiosity and awe in the visitor-spectator. In the twentieth century, unlike the previous displays of «unicorn horns» or such objects, it is intended an empathy and understanding on the natural world which is presumably objective and more scientifically informed. Which is to say that the scope of analysis of these museum structures and displays should be aware of all the proposals for a new educated and culturally improved society that the mediating structure that is the Museum as an institution represents. Or, as Haraway [1984] reads the work of Carl Akeley in the American Museum of Natural History of New York, this specific representation of the diorama as 'pure' nature as being a prophylactic dosage of Nature for the twentieth century citizen museum visitor. So, the visual scenic effect of the diorama is a symbolic shrine to nature inside the museum walls achieved through the improved taxidermy techniques. Carl Akeley's dioramas are a privileged glance, a revelation, a vision of the knowledgeable world. Much like the renaissance notion of pictorial space of the canvas

as an “opening of a window to the world”. To the visitor of the Akeley's African Hall, a diorama gallery, the experience is of an actual travel in space and time. The diorama transcends the boundaries of representation allying the three-dimensional scene along with its pictorial mise en scène, prolonging the visual illusion of being there without being there. The ability of re-presenting of these displays is clearly reinforced via the use of the taxidermy specimens. For the taxidermist, the choice of each specific specimen and each specific pose is of paramount importance. It implies a selective process of denominating characteristics that may function as synecdoche, as a representation of a whole taxon.

What we mean to convey is that there are linguistic processes happening on the reading of museum objects. A taxidermy animal inside a museum display is part of a discourse about nature, about science and about culture.

PARS PRO TOTO

The Natural History Museum is a place where nature, i.e. reality is reconfigured and realigned according to prevailing cultural and social constructs. It is thus a mediating process which continuously produces and reproduces; presents and represents reality as it is constantly culturally redefined. The Natural History Museum Object/Specimen is a sign, a sparkle of nature that can be, and is in fact, perceived as the whole of the natural science contents it represents. This specific process of comprehension of a system of simulacra is a complex linguistic process that overcomes the materiality of each specimen; even as this understanding happens we never take representation for reality; there is an analogical process between actual presence of a specimen and its simultaneous substitution of a whole.

What we find in the natural history museum are always simulacra, always representations of a given idea about natural classification and organization. Although the museum table never refers to the idiosyncrasies of a specimen and always to a generalization of a species, we as visitors perceived this complicated linguistic process as a part of the underlying structure and performance the natural history museum implies and demands, i. e. if we are observing a Ginkgo Biloba L. specimen in the museum and we state that it was around even when dinosaurs ruled the earth; we are not really referring to the specificities of the specimen before us but to a whole species. This, we believe, is a complex sign-signifier relationship that is part of our producing and reading natural history museums.

ANALOGICAL IDEAS

Two francophone authors Schiele and Montpetit also read the diorama as a culturally specific and relative construct, that is a reproduction of a preconceived cultural order rooted in the western society visual dependency for obtaining and perpetuating knowledge. Schiele [1996] supports a definition of the diorama as semiotic system that allows all these linguistic processes of simultaneously presenting and representing; of coincident presence and substitution of scientific ideas.

Montpetit [in Schiele, 1996: 55-100] reads the diorama as part of a structure of an analogical take on museum displays and museography. A device that presents the viewer with original objects or its reproductions disposed in a specific context in a design in which the whole produces an image, i.e. refers by means of analogy, to a specific place and state of the Real outside the museum; this situation is identified by the viewer which situates him or herself in the origin of what he or she sees. This author analyses in detail all the cognitive and perceptive details of this analogical reading of visual displays. The force of this analogical relation comes from the synchronized presence of the artefact and its substitution; the production of a representation of an idea with aide from certain material presences.

META MUSEUM

As a mediating process of reproducing social and cultural relations, museology and exhibition production is a transversal field of knowledge. To manage museum contents or to design museographical structures are both revealing of a certain predominant paradigm. The diorama as a museum display was once representation of a certain presentation of scientific knowledge. What may it mean today?

In the most recent state of the art science exhibitions the stress is again on the authenticity of each specimen presented, and the more real is the presentation, more effective results it produces in the visiting crowds of the museum. The hands-on model of scientific exhibits and the use of real muscle tissue in anatomic presentations only appears to be a shift in the representation / presentation model addressed here. In fact, the appeal of the naturalistic representation though not only visual, but increasingly more and more sensorial is a success factor for a scientific or natural history exhibition.

THE DIORAMA TIME MACHINE

The taxidermy based diorama is a dated display, more and more being substituted by its 3d animations and video graphical equivalent. Nonetheless, what it represents for the history of epistemological scientific knowledge is valid even in

today’s natural history museum. The diorama is a very specific cultural construct; a cultural reproduction set on the modern visual paradigm of understanding and analyzing the world visually; these were display structures that produced and reproduced meanings and agendas both cultural and social.

The diorama as a visual structure transcends the boundaries of representation itself, consolidating a three-dimensional arrangement with its pictorial setting, which extends the viewer's point of view stressing the mise en scène of the Real. The Natural History Museum and nineteenth century's Science epistemological history is withhold in such displays as the diorama. These are mediating structures designed to organize knowledge, scientific knowledge, inside the walls of the Museum; signifying a specific composition of realistic and naturalistic values.

Dioramas used to be display structures, but may nowadays be more clearly perceived as historical evidences of the developments on the history of science and of scientific literacy in the last century. As well as other dated museographical features, it may be used as a device to revise the meanings of the Natural History Museum nowadays.

References:

HARAWAY, Donna, 1984, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936 in Social Text, 1984 (5), Nº11, pp. 19-64.

SCHIELE, Bernard (dir.), 1996, “Les Dioramas”, Públics & Musées, Nº 9, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon.

SCHIELE, Bernard, 2001, Le Musée de Sciences. Montée du modèle communicationnel et recomposition du champ muséal, Paris: L’Harmattan.

WOOD, R. Derek, 1993, “The Diorama in Great Britain”, in History of Photography, Vol. 17, N.3, Autumn 1993, pp.284-295. http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/diorama/Diorama_Wood_1_1.htm#back1.

WOOD, R. Derek, 1997, “Daguerre and his Diorama in the 1830’s: some financial anouncements”, in Photoresearcher. European Society for the history of Photography, Croydon, N.6 (1994/1995/1996), pp.35-40. http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/diorama/Diorama_Wood_2.htm.