Artist Anne Zahalka credits Holden Caulfield, the fictional character in The Catcher in the Rye , for changing the way she approached her art. While working in New York in the early 1980s, the Sydney-born photographer and collagist became fascinated with the American Museum of Natural History’s giant dioramas, which she’d read about in J.D.
Salinger’s novel. Australian photographer Anne Zahalka in her Newtown home. Credit: Rhett Wyman “I was just blown away when I saw them for the first time.
They were like these portals into another world, and there were floors of them,” she recalls of the dioramas created in the early 1900s. They detail habitats ranging from Arctic tundra to tropical rainforest, and feature life-size models of bears, zebras and even a Neanderthal couple. She was especially fond of one that included birds in an Australian landscape.
Back in the days when you could bring a camera with a tripod into museums, she’d photograph them. Years later she would use these pictures to create collages. “The dioramas recreated these scenes, through painting and taxidermy based on field trips, that were absolutely artificial and fake, as a way to preserve what once was pristine nature to show it to urban New Yorkers,” Zahalka says.
“Holden Caulfield used to like to go to the Natural History Museum because everything remained the same. Nothing ever moved. You could go back there a million times and it would all be just in the same place.
And as his life beg.