JAN 11-MAR 23, 2025

Photography & the Specimen

Inspired by Kija Lucas’s use of botanical specimens to reveal hidden histories, this selection of photographs from the Mills College Art Museum’s collection explores various modes of the photographic specimen and their operations as forms of knowledge.

Specimens—those singular things meant to exemplify larger groups of objects, people, or phenomena—are often associated with the sciences. But any object or creature, keenly observed through the camera, may be elevated to the status of a specimen.

The specimen is a longstanding vehicle for artists, who frequently explore how we project our experiences through things. Isolated in photographs, our everyday objects become specimens that sum up a relationship, evoke a desire, crystallize an identity or a memory. Artists like Kija Lucas—and in this exhibition, Shi Tou, Joe Deal, Binh Danh, and Jennifer Brandon—also slyly invoke the form of the specimen to critique classification systems and the cultural biases they reflect.

Never just a sample, every photographed specimen betrays a choice about representing the whole by example. Works in the exhibition explore specimens as emblems of place, anthropological evidence, teaching tools, cultural monuments, and exemplars of identities and communities. Others are more personal, deploying specimens as distillations of nature’s order, tokens of memory, or surrealist thought-objects.

Photography & the Specimen is curated by Dr. Sarah Miller, Associate Adjunct Professor, Art History and is supported by the Bourne Special Gallery Projects Endowment.