archiemcphee:

Look out, it’s a Land Shark!

Klaus Pichler was wandering home from a bar one morning when he noticed a light coming from a basement window at Vienna’s Museum of Natural History.  Even at that hour, he thought, someone was hard at work inside.

But Mr. Pichler didn’t see any people. He saw an antelope.

“It looked really strange and grotesque,” he said.

And it stuck with him. So, the next morning he contacted the museum’s director, who took him on a behind-the-scenes tour. The room he’d seen was the museum’s taxidermy division.

Mr. Pichler was intrigued — and fortunate. For the next three years, the museum let him roam its corridors and  workshops,  allowing him to capture a backstage view of a highly orchestrated production. The result of his snooping, “Skeletons in the Closet,” appeared at the Delhi Photo Festival in October.

“I really enjoyed knowing that I was alone in the basement with 4,000 stuffed animals,” he said.

Check out more photos from the Skeletons in the Closet series at the New York Times 

[via Neatorama]