Brilliant images of museum pieces outside the glass

Removed from their cabinets, museum pieces take on a strange quality. Once the glass is gone, some of their mystique goes too; and they feel almost like everyday things to be used and touched, rather than alien relics to be admired. It’s this disorientating new quality that’s captured so beautifully in Thom Atkinson’s series Museums, showing pieces from the Wellcome Trust and National History Museum collections.

The Wellcome Collection pieces were shot to mark its 75th anniversary in a piece for Financial Times Weekend Magazine. The Natural History Museum photographs also featured in the publication to promote the National Treasures exhibition. And if that gorilla isn’t a treasure, I don’t know what is.