Photo essay: a shark in a corridor and a toad seated on a filing cabinet are among the scenes found by Austrian photographer Klaus Pichler when he went backstage at the Natural History Museum Vienna (+ slideshow).
Pichler spent four years exploring the non-public spaces of the museum, which boasts a collection of over 30 million objects. During this time, he found an assortment of surreal scenes, created when exhibits had been stored in unusual places.
His photography series, titled Skeletons in the Closet, reveals some of these findings. Jim Stephenson spoke to Pichler to find out the story behind the project.

Museums are not just exhibition spaces for the public. Historically, a key function of these buildings was to provide space to sort and to classify. As such, they often house expansive research and development spaces, storage depots and administrative offices, which are frequently vast in scale. In the case of the Natural History Museum Vienna, around 80 per cent of its 45,000 square metres of floor space is not open to the public.
While walking through Vienna one evening, a chance glimpse through a window led Klaus Pichler on a four-year photographic documentation of the museum's backstage spaces. Through the window, he saw a seemingly normal office with the lights still on. The office contained all that you might expect, with the addition of a stuffed adult antelope in the corner.
"This view left me thinking about what the backstage ro...