It’s practically impossible to make it through all four sprawling floors of the American Museum of Natural History in one day. Despite the building’s astonishing breadth, however, only 1% or 2% of the museum’s collection of approximately 30 million objects is on display at any one time.

As the museum’s first artist in residence, Justine Cooper was given the chance to peek behind the dioramas. The results of her year-long photography project are on display in the new exhibit “Saved by Science” at Kashya Hildebrand Gallery.

Ms. Cooper used a vintage wood camera to photograph the museum’s massive collection, including a closet full of hanging tiger skins, banks of beetles mounted on pinheads, and many other cabinets of curiosities. A shot of an off-site storage facility in South Brooklyn is the only outdoor image.

“It’s a magical place, and it was a singular experience,” Ms. Cooper said.

The artist’s parents ran a veterinary hospital in Australia, and by age 5, she was opening sutures and powder gloves in their operating theater – so she is not squeamish around closets of elephant feet or monkeys preserved in large glass jars. But there were surprises as she made her way through the museum’s various departments.

“Up in the carnivore room, I opened up a cabinet to find someone’s pet cat staring back at me. Apparently, they had donated their Persian kitty decades ago after having it taxidermied. The expression on its neighbor’s face was of total disdain, as if to say, ‘Who let you into this collection?'”

The museum no longer accepts mammalian donations. But troves of previously bequeathed trophy mounts are in the collection. A museum employee had to pick a lock to let Ms. Cooper into a suspended cage of preserved mounts in the museum’s attic, one of the building’s oldest areas. “It was very dark and also a sweltering 110 degrees,” she said. In the months since she took the photograph seen above at right, the items have been transferred to climate-controlled storage.

Ms. Cooper first examined the collections in 2001, working from a grant from the Australian Network for Art and Technology. Those glimpses whetted her appetite, and she made a formal proposal to photograph the collections in 2003 and 2004. She spent 800 hours researching and shooting the project.

For many viewers, the first reaction to some of the photographs will be morbid curiosity, but ultimately, “Saved by Science” is about more than that.

“I was fascinated with the way we are the only species that tries to understand where we came from and where everything else came from, how curious we are in attempting to contain the complexity of nature, to collect, identify, label, study, and scrutinize on such a massive scale,” Ms. Cooper said.

“My own head is now full of stories and snippets,” she added. “But sadly, they are not organized in a fashion nearly as useful as the museum’s collections are!”

“Saved by Science”: Through Saturday, June 4, Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, 531 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-366-5757, free.