Photographer Giovanni Presutti is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of these photographs. These images are from his project ‘Anomalia Extinta‘. To see Giovanni’s body of work click on any image.
This work was created in the Museum of Natural History of Florence “La Specola”. The museum, founded by Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Lorraine, was opened to the public in 1775 and is the oldest science museum in Europe. It contains the world’s largest collection of taxidermy animals (3,500,000, of which about 5,000 visible to the public). More and more species are unfortunately endangered and the number of those that have become extinct is also constantly increasing. The causes of this worrying situation often depend on the growth of human activity and affect mostly species confined to environmentally fragile areas, with limited reproductive capacity or that have not developed an adequate escape or defense behavior. What was once a practice of scientific cataloging of species has become in many cases the only existing memory of some species, as if part of nature now no longer existed in its original environment, but only in one recreated artificially by man. This is a worrying reversal of terms, which mirrors a future where our planet’s biodiversity is increasingly at risk. Hence, my choice to represent the subjects in an abstract form to be perceived as borderline between the living and the dead, between the real and the unreal.
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By Giovanni Presutti