Growing up in New York City, my exposure to animals was limited. I saw dogs, squirrels, the occasional horse, and unhappy creatures in their depressing surroundings at the Central Park Zoo. But I was fascinated by the dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History. There, the science and art of taxidermy, combined with props and painted backgrounds, allowed me to see animals in a manner that would otherwise have been impossible; it fueled my curiosity to no end.

In 1990 I visited a friend of mine at a small Victorian-era museum in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where he was the curator. He asked if I had ever seen “the animals.” When I told him I hadn’t, he took me to a storage room in which there were hundreds of taxidermy specimens, mostly in disrepair. The pathos was abundant; I was transported back to my childhood memories of being spellbound in front of museum dioramas, and I knew that I wanted to photograph the specimens.

I had recently learned about a photographic technique called front-screen projection, which (before the advent of digital imaging and Photoshop) was used to allow a background scene in slide form to be projected over a subject, using a special projector and screen. This allowed a portrait subject to be placed in virtually any scene that had been photographed. My goal in using this approach to was to make images of the animals that amounted to faux dioramas. Rather than being faithful to taxonomy, I responded to qualities I found in the shapes and colors of the animals as well as to the choices made by the taxidermist in posing and mounting them.