Diorama, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, originally uploaded by Gordon Gerard McLean.
Founded in 1869, the American Museum of Natural History, located on the Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York, USA, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world. Located on park-like grounds, the museum comprises 25 interconnected buildings that house 46 permanent exhibition halls, research laboratories, and its renowned library. The collections contain over 32 million specimens of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. The museum has a scientific staff of more than 200, and sponsors over 100 special field expeditions each year.
Renowned naturalists, artists, photographers, taxidermists and other museum personnel have all blended their talents to create the great habitat dioramas, which can be found in halls throughout the museum. These world famous dioramas represent an unparalleled melding of art and science, "designed to nurture a reverence for nature by creating an illusion of its beauty and grandeur"; the dioramas recreate a specific site shown at a particular moment in the day and season of the year, combining the arts of taxidermy, model-making, painting, and lighting: "behind the glass, all of nature is locked in an instant of time for our close examination and study".
Born in an era of black-and-white photography, when wildlife photography was in its earliest stages, the dioramas have themselves become major historic attractions.
