Big picture: photographer Nicolas Wilmouth's Cabinet of Curiosities

Five years ago, French photographer Nicolas Wilmouth embarked on an ambitious work: shooting studio portraits of dogs in the style of Old Master paintings. The challenging project took three months – and a few years off his life. → Photograph: Nicolas Wilmouth

For his next series, entitled Le Singe, La Girafe et L’ibis Rouge (the monkey, the giraffe and the scarlet ibis), Wilmouth made life easier for himself and photographed captive animals in old Paris zoos. Here, the faded, painted backdrops to the cages match the forlorn-looking animals, and lend the pictures a rather sad, bygone air. → Photograph: Nicolas Wilmouth

For his latest work, Wilmouth dispensed with live animals altogether and turned to more house-trained species: taxidermied birds from a natural history museum in Elbeuf, a small town 140km from Paris. The idea was to create a series of photographs that crossed portrait with still life, lit in a way that evoked stylised, 17th-century oil paintings but that also somehow brought these dusty creatures – some of them centuries old – to life. His ultimate goal, he says, was to create an ambiguity around whether the specimens were dead or alive. → Photograph: Nicolas Wilmouth

He scoured the display cabinets of the museum, looking for a certain je ne sais quoi: a glint in a (glass) eye, or a glimpse of a soul behind thinning feathers and tatty claws. → Photograph: Nicolas Wilmouth

Setting up a temporary studio in an unused room, he posed the birds in front of a black backdrop and started shooting. → Photograph: Nicolas Wilmouth

Often, just details emerge from the gloom: a curved neck, a beak, or a pair of piercing eyes. The result is unsettling, and at first glance you might be forgiven for thinking these creatures are still breathing. Photograph: Nicolas Wilmouth