- Photographer Christian Voigt travels to museums in Europe to take photographs of $4, mastodons, and saber-toothed cats.
- Voigt uses a black cloth backdrop and natural light to capture each skeleton individually and in detail.
- His goal is to $4 through his photography, Voigt said.
- $4.
Traveling back in time to the age of the dinosaurs is beyond the reach of
Voigt has traveled to five natural history museums across Europe to photograph dinosaurs and other extinct animals' skeletons, producing a collection of images that depict these long-dead creatures in a new light.
"I sought to really bring these animals to life," Voigt told Business Insider, adding, "I have to remind people that these aren't Hollywood images, but rather real animals that lived millions of years ago."
But photographing museum specimens presents unique challenges for a photographer, since the skeletons cannot be shifted, posed, or removed from their display cases. Museums also restrict the use of additional lightning, so Voigt photographs the dinosaurs using only natural light and relies on a black back-drop to separate each animal from its neighbors.
"I can't touch them, or ask them to move a little to left, so I have to look for the best angle," he said.
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Voigt said he was inspired to work with dinosaur skeletons after a visit to the Natural History Museum in London some years ago. Seeing the displays made him want to photograph each specimen individually.
"It all started with wanting to bring these animals out of their glass boxes," he said. "In a museum, when you look at certain collections of animals and skeletons, they're always very packed together."
He said he sometimes spends an hour finding and capture a single, ideal shot. The resulting images reveal every groove, divot, and eye socket of the skeletal bodies of creatures like the triceratops, T. rex, and stegosaurus.
Here are 15 breath-taking images from Voigt's collection.