Evolution

Six months of daily shooting of over 250 skeletons at the Museum of Natural History in Paris as well as 4 other locations in France. From the smallest to the biggest vertebrate, isolated in front of a black background, Patrick Gries presents these skeletons as sculptures. This series of stark black-and-white photographs offers an atypical approach to viewing natural science and forces us to reconsider the boundaries between artistic and scientific objects. Spectacular, mysterious, elegant, or grotesque, vertebrate skeletons have become objects of art, while they carry within them the traces of several billion years of evolution.

EVOLUTION ― The Personal Collection is an excerpt from the book Evolution, published by Xavier Barral who initiated the idea, in which more than two hundred of Gries' photographs are accompanied with text written by scientist and documentarian Dr. Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu. The result is a powerful pairing that profoundly illustrates how we came to be what we are. Evolution steps beyond the debate and presents the undeniable truth of Darwin's theory. Showing through skeletons both obscure, commonplace, and intriguing, the process in which life has transformed itself, again and again.

The photographs have entered private art collections and have been on exhibitions in France, Denmark and Russia.