These images are all housed within the archives of the American Museum of Natural History. As a class assignment, each student in my class Anthropology in and of Museums (taught at the NYU Program in Museum Studies in Spring 2009) was given an image to research. Barbara Mathé, the Museum Archivist and Head of Library Special Collections and I selected the images. We gave them to the students and encouraged them to think at first purely from the image: what could they learn not only from the content of the image, but the way in which it has been annotated, catalogued, curated, and archived. Following these leads, each student conducted original research into their images. These are their stories.
Dr Haidy Geismar, Anthropology and Museum Studies, NYU