As a senior photographer at Yale’s Beinecke Library, Meredith Miller, AB’98, has taken hundreds of thousands of photographs of archival materials. Working quickly, she often doesn’t know much about the pieces’ history. Instead she gets to know each object “through its physicality,” she says.

As she turned the pages she was photographing, she started to notice the way illustrations remained visible through the backs of the pages. Long preoccupied by the precarity of endangered species, Miller was especially moved by the shadowy reverse images of animals, which she came to see as ghosts of disappearing species.

Such materials became the basis for the still-life series Dreaming Animals, begun in 2020. Each photograph highlights one species and is paired with a poem by Miller’s Beinecke colleague MJ Millington. Miller’s most recent work, The Tigers Are Burning (2024), the companion to Millington’s “What Dread Hand,” draws on the collection of Yale’s Peabody Museum, including the images of a Chinese woodblock calendar that line the background.

The way most of us interact with endangered species, Miller notes, is through objects, often toys. She has incorporated game elements throughout the series to comment on this commodification of the natural world. In The Tigers Are Burning—the work’s name borrowed, like the others in Dreaming Animals, from a board game—checkered cards litter the ground; an aloe plant holds a wooden snake and an eye Miller’s dog ripped from a stuffed toy; a plastic toy found on a beach stalks in the foreground. Like paper dolls, the paper tigers stand on folded tab feet among tufts of tissue paper.

After photographing the composition, which she set up on a corner of her kitchen counter, Miller experimented with color, drawing over the image with pastels. The hues she ultimately chose for The Tigers Are Burning stand out among the 16 other photographs that currently make up Dreaming Animals. She added shocks of red, orange, and yellow: a fire in the foreground, representing our present, against a background of ash—the future.

Hear MJ Millington’s poem “What Dread Hand.”