In the mid 1990s, Francois Robert was at an auction in rural Michigan. A school was selling off supplies, and Robert was looking to buy some furniture for his studio. When he opened up a locker he had purchased, he found a human skeleton.

It took him years to figure out what to do with the skeleton.

Since then, Robert has spent hundreds of hours working with the bones, arranging them painstakingly into striking, iconic shapes, each five or six feet wide, and photographing them with a 4x5 Hasselblad rigged to a boom to provide a bird's eye view.