By Conor Risch

During the 1990s Richard Barnes worked as a photographer on archeological expeditions in Abydos, Egypt. While he was photographing the excavations, he became interested in where the excavated artifacts were going, and so began photographing the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which, along with a commission to photograph a museum renovation in California, lead to an interest in the role of museums in our culture.

Barnes has worked as an architectural photographer, and architectural themes inform his personal work. "My work [as a whole] is primarily concerned with architecture and containment," he says. "Museums are containers of the dead." Some of his first Egyptian Museum photographs were of the displays of animal remains that had been mummified and interned with human bodies by the ancient Egyptians.

Eventually Barnes was attracted to animal remains at natural history museums as subjects of interest, particularly the ways museums organized and displayed animal artifacts. Over the course of several years, Barnes photographed animal collections in other museums, among them the Smithsonian Institution, the California Academy of Sciences, the Fragonard Museum in Paris, and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. After a 2004 exhibition of his work from Paris's Museum of Comparative Anatomy, which focused on meticulously organized taxonomic displays, Princeton Architectural Press asked Barnes if he would be interested in pursuing a monograph. The resulting book, Animal Logic, will be published this fall.

Divided into five chapters, the book considers the animal world and how we relate to it through several distinct but connected bodies of work. For his "Container" work, Barnes went into the Smithsonian's deep storage to photograph preserved animal specimens packed away in wood crates. He considers these animals twice dead; first culled from nature and then banished from the museum floor.

For "Diorama," he photographed the traditional natural history museum scenes in various states of construction or refurbishment, often with the museum workers in the scenes. Barnes says he liked the idea of humans taking the place of animals in the dioramas. "I like this permutation, I like the fact that this stage set that we have come to appreciate as a diorama is somehow violated or broken." Barnes also appreciates the diorama's inherent paradox: humans subjugate animals, then reanimate them.

In the "Refuge" series, Barnes looks at nests birds have constructed from human waste like tinsel and newspaper. And "Skull" is a typology of animal skull displays.

In 2005 Barnes traveled to Rome to continue his museum work after winning the American Academy's Rome Prize. There he discovered a phenomenon that would become the subject of his "Murmur" project, the only series of photographs in the book that include live animals as subjects. Every evening, in a certain area of Rome, thousands of starlings perform an intricate ritual. They fly in unison in various directions, creating massive shapes in the sky, before they settle down to roost.

"Some people have said to me that this is a separate book," Barnes says of the black and white "Murmur" series. "Part of me wanted to take [the book] out of this realm of everything being about death," he relates. But for him the starling images also epitomize the book's title. As humans we make sense of the actions of the starlings by seeing familiar shapes in their flight patterns, or ornithologists theorize about why the act takes place, but they don't know for sure. "I like that kind of duality between what we bring to it and what the animals are actually doing," says Barnes. "That probably more than anything else refers to the title, Animal Logic."