Taking a photograph is one way to preserve a fleeting moment, or in the case of Sean Dooley’s photographs—fleeting animal species.
In his poignant series ‘After Life’, he captures the ephemerality of life in stunning photographs of extinct and endangered animals.
To do so, he visited natural history museums and gained access to private collections.
“I visited them to satisfy my own curiosity, and documented them so that other people could share in their beauty,” said Dooley.
Dooley shares these rare specimens with the public through his photographs. Some of these animals are so elusive that they have never been seen in the wild before.
Dooley also considers the act of taxidermy and the collection of mounts of rare species, emphasizing that “every preserved specimen represents a life lost”.
[via Horniman Museum and Sean Dooley]