For Diana Michener, bones are treasures, and this book is her preservation of them through photography in a way that honors their value as vessels of lives past. Inspired by nineteenth-century photography, along with Paul Strand and Irving Penn, Michener chose the appropriately delicate and precious medium of platinum prints, which she crafted in her darkroom from analogue film shot on a Hasselblad 500 C camera. Bones recreates both the look and spirit of these prints through offset printing on Phoenixmotion Xantur paper, each image interspersed with glassine leaves to create the sense of an antique photographic album. Michener’s subjects are both human and animal bones, photographed between 2018 and 2021 in collections including Luxembourg’s Museum of Natural History, Strasbourg’s Zoological Museum and the Musee de Cambrai-often in restricted areas, thus revealing many bones not normally accessible to the public. In her words: Bones bear witness to a life, and in and of themselves they show the magnificent structures of our forms. They are what is left.

Bones are a physical trace of a soul. - Diana Michener