INTRODUCTION15viving specimens to raise funds for the shop’s refurbishment.^5 Over-
night, taxidermy regained its cool. The celebrity endorsements, the media
attention, the social media shares, and the tragic entanglements of life
and death proposed by an event charged with filmic allure led to today’s
conspicuous abundance of taxidermy mounts in interior design maga-
zines, fashion shops, and bars around Europe. In 2014, taxidermy courses,
according to the Evening Standard, were a “sell-out hit” in London.^6
Meanwhile, in New York, taxidermy became the “new hipster hobby,”^7
as a Sky News headline read “Taxidermy: Art of Stuffing Animals Dead
Trendy.”^8 But besides the hype, the haunting photographs of burnt
taxidermy mounts insistently grabbed my attention. A selection of
these later appeared in two volumes, one by Pierre Assouline, titled
Deyrolle—Pour l’Avenir; the other a collaboration between photogra-
pher Laurent Bochet and de Broglie, Deyrolle’s owner, titled 1000 De-
grees C. Deyrolle (fig. I.1).^9
Perhaps not surprisingly, these images generated romanticized re-
sponses contemplating the unavoidable completion of a cycle of decay
that, thought arrested by science and craft, had been reclaimed to dust
by fire.^10 Pointing at the aesthetic continuity between the charred archi-
tectural surroundings of the shop and the surviving specimens, Martin
d’Orgeval said: “creation, conservation, and destruction have followed
on from one another—a process completed and given closure by pho-
tography.”^11 Despite the sublimity of rhetorical statements like these,
what became intriguing was the aesthetics of ruination constructed by
these photographs—an elusive quality that exacerbated the suspended
life/death dichotomy that so much characterizes the realism of taxi-
dermy. Observing many of these images revealed that the tension mak-
ing these animal bodies so abrasively present pertained to internal
economies of realism and abstraction specifically related to the repre-
sentation of animal bodies in art. These images exposed an abrasive
animal materiality capable of subverting photography’s sometimes idi-
omatic inability to tell the living from the dead. They ultimately en-
gaged in a new play of visibilities and invisibilities that ontologically
problematized the intrinsic instability characterizing all taxidermy ob-
jects while simultaneously gesturing toward an intriguing critique of
realism.