Joerg Burger’s meticulous and mesmerising study of the Vienna Museum of Natural History is itself a work of natural history, in that it studies its core subject from a number of methodological angles. In one level, it simply puts the displays on display via some exquisitely composed, high-resolution photography that drinks in the rooms, both public and private, where the many collections dwell; vitrine after vitrine, drawer upon drawer, archive boxes until the end of time, with beetles, geological samples, taxidermied birds and botanical samples, each one lovingly tagged and sorted.
That said, the fact that the archive is only maybe 10% digitised and indexed means that the staff clock up kilometres’ worth of walking every day as they search for requested items: as such this is also a study of information science at a point of crisis.
