ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how photography was used as a copying practice in three activities crucial to maintain and justify a natural history museum around 1900: In displaying, making and bargaining objects. Crowds of stuffed animals neatly confined in glass cases greet visitors entering the Mammal Hall in the Gothenburg Natural History Museum. If hides of prize-winning purebred dogs were difficult to obtain even in England, obtaining hides of exotic big animals was not an easy matter for a Nordic museum with limited means. A specimen of organic material such as an animal hide or a bird skin is thus a remnant – remnants of a once-living animal that have been processed and preserved, according to strict and standardised procedures, to serve as data for research or education. Photography was a tool for making, mediating and selling museum nature and, in the case of the field photograph, for maintaining a link between live nature and museum nature.
