Photographer Christian Voigt
LURCHING out of the gloom like something from a gothic horror movie, this otherworldly creature is a 66-million-year-old dinosaur called Euoplocephalus. Like its relative Ankylosaurus, it was a heavily armoured herbivore with a club-like defensive tail. It was over 5 metres long and weighed around 2.5 tonnes.
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The specimen resides in front of a painted diorama in the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History in Frankfurt, Germany. German photographer Christian Voigt placed a black drape behind it to isolate the bones in superb detail. He used a large-format analogue camera to shoot the skeleton, then digitised the images so he could pare away everything but bone, like a palaeontologist preparing a specimen for display.
The other portraits here, shot in museums in Paris and Berlin, use the same technique to show the small, predatory dinosaur Unenlagia and a Tyrannosaurus rex skull. They are part of Voigt’s series, on display at London’s from this week until 20 October.
The touring exhibition also features photos of extinct reptiles and mammals, including an American mastodon and a sabre-toothed cat. Unenlagia is exclusive to the London show.
Voigt, the first fine-art photographer given access to the specimens, says he was inspired by the blue whale skeleton in the Natural History Museum in London.
