Amy Stein,

A couple Friday's ago, on January 22nd, I found my way to Harvard Square on a search for Harvard's Museum of Natural History. That afternoon, Amy Stein was giving a gallery talk before an opening reception for the Museum's exhibition of her series Domesticated.

In Between © Amy Stein

Unfortunately, due to technical issues, Amy wasn't able to show us her slideshow. She said she wanted to show us images that led up to this series, images that haven't been published anywhere yet. Instead she talked about previous series and flipped through images on her website. Of course this was still really interesting, but I do hope sometime I can find out what unseen images she was going to show us.

She spoke of her past with photography, and I learned that she had only come to photography quite recently at the age of thirty-two as a second career. Before then she was working in 'politics and the online world' as she called it, but after the beginning of the new millennium her company went under and she had to start over. It was during her time at SVA to get her MFA that she started on Domesticated.

The series focuses on the small rural town of Matamoras, Pennsylvania where people's back porches face huge forests teeming with wildlife. Here she became friends with the local taxidermist who was also a prominent social figure. Whenever a hunter came in with a kill to be taxidermied she was given leave to use the animal in her photographs between the time it was finished and the hunter came to pick it up. Through these animals she was able to create extremely lifelike situations where wild animal and humans came into contact. Each photograph is set up either according to a firsthand account or to Amy's interpretations of a story or situation she had heard from the townspeople.

Backyard © Amy Stein

The exhibit held a selection of her series printed as beautiful digital c-prints within the extremely appropriate setting of taxidermy animals already in the Museum's collection. Adjacent rooms faced viewers with prehistoric fossils, dioramas of bird egg sizes, glass jars filled with ancient beetles and displays of all kinds of creatures caught in flight, step and crouch. The juxtaposition of the physicality of similar animals as Amy had chosen to photograph and the two-dimensional representation of their lives was fascinating.

Rose