The Bones Of Francois Robert

The Bones of Francois Robert

In the mid 1990's Francois Robert was at an auction in Michigan looking to buy some furniture for his studio. "I was interested in buying some lockers, and they had three for $50." Little did he know that inside one of the lockers was a human skeleton.

The skeleton which was wired must have been used as a display in aiding a science class. Robert was limited in what he could do with the skeleton due to the wires, so online he found a source for disarticulated human skeletons.

Since then, Robert has spent hundreds of hours working with those bones, arranging them painstakingly into striking, iconic shapes, each five or six feet wide, and photographing them with a 4.5 Hasselblad rigged to a boom to provide a bird's eye view. He calls the resulting images "Stop the Violence." Each shot takes a full day to set up. "I was on my knees for all of 2008," Robert remembers.