DIORAMAS119lifelike value that scientific taxidermy was expected to embody. And here
lies the main reason why taxidermy, despite having conquered realism of
the most sophisticated kind, could not become a legitimate art form: it
was denied legitimacy because of its indexicality, a malaise in the eyes of
classical art, which it shared with photography—a form of representation
that was also excluded from the canon at the time.
Within the limitations imposed by the photographic lexis and its in-
trinsic indexical quality, the snapshot constitutes a specific photographic
genre, one that compositionally relies on the spontaneity of “apparent
chance” and that contextually puts forward candid claims of veridical-
ity. Christian Metz described the snapshot as a peculiar photographical
occurrence in which “the instantaneous abduction of the object out of
the world into another world, into another kind of time” takes place.^34 By
essence, the snapshot catches its subject by surprise—in the context of
taxidermy, and in the encounter with wild animals, the snapshot may
indeed capture animals in “unflattering poses” as they are startled or at-
tempt to flee. In so doing, the snapshot image would reveal the implicit
presence of the human within the scene, even perhaps revealing the horror
that preceded the killing. But taxidermy, in its resurrective approach to
animal bodies, has always been concerned with undoing death, suturing
wounds, and wiping blood. The intricacies proposed by the overlapping of
the technologies of the camera and those of the gun were originally ex-
plored by Susan Sontag in On Photography.^35 Here, in the context of taxi-
dermy, they bear a new and striking level of complexity—one that Donna
Haraway has fully explored in “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the
Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936.” Her analysis, as will be later
seen, aptly mapped the ideological undercurrents of patriarchal, national
identity, gender, and racial values that taxidermy began to embody.^36
What is the elusive lifelike quality of taxidermy—that quintessential
value so essential to the most convincing and awe-inspiring dioramas?
The lifelike virtue that taxidermy came to embody at the turn of the cen-
tury entailed much more than capturing a truth of animal livingness, and
it meant more than simply capturing a photographic image of an animal.
Browne may not have been aware that his objection to the use of photog-
raphy ideologically stood on more complex grounds than the aesthetic
ones he vocalized. As Haraway argued, taxidermy animals in dioramas
were presented as inhabitants of an unspoiled Garden of Eden from which