In the exhibit Collections, Neal Rantoul photographs animal and human remains that often are not easy to look at but insist on being deliberated.

“:Central to Rantoul’s work is a generous regard for the spirit of what is superficially odd, indeed disquieting, but essentially worthy of our attention,” writes David Raymond in the introduction to a book of Rantoul’s work, Collections.

An exhibit of Rantoul’s images, Anatomical Specimens of the 19th Century, is featured at the Griffin Museum at Digital Silver Imaging in Belmont, MA, January 20 through March 18. The images were taken at The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia and the Reggio Emilia Civic Museum in Italy.

The Mutter Museum is a forensics study museum that is part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Established in the1800s as a center for the study of medicine, it is now a museum open to the public. Rantoul photographed at the museum in 2003 and 2004.

The collection at the Reggio Emilia Civic Museum was donated by Lazzarro Spallanzani, a preeminent 18th-century Italian researcher in natural history, experimental biology and physiology. Rantoul photographed there one day in 2009, under supervision.

Raymond says the subjects photographed at both sites “:are forensic evidence of the alterations within the genetic soup of living and the science that studies it, providing us with the terrible wonders that are interspersed with our own acceptable ordinariness. To receive the information of these photographs is to receive something of ourselves.”

Rantoul has been a working photographer and educator for more than 30 years. He has taught at Harvard University and is currently the head of photography at Northeastern University in Boston.

Collections: Anatomical Specimens of the 19th Century is presented at the Griffin Museum’s Digital Silver Gallery courtesy of Panopticon Gallery in Boston, MA.