Bernd Behr, Akeley Inside the Elephant

Akeley Inside the Elephant is a research

project on sprayed concrete, a process

used in the tunnelling and mining industries,

and the provenance it shares with the

histories of cinematography and natural

history dioramas through its inventor, the

American taxidermist Carl E. Akeley (1864–

1926). Reconsidering this industrial process

of the built environment as critically

entangled with Akeley’s pioneering work

at natural history museums in Chicago and

New York in the early 20th-century and his

subsequent development of a novel 35mm

cine camera for field recordings in Africa, the

project highlights this historical juncture as

contributing to an expanded discourse on

photographic ontology.