Between man and beast

“We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world,’’ Stein writes, “yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature.’’ Seventeen of her photographs make up “Domesticated: Modern Dioramas of Our Natural History.’’ The show runs at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History - not all that far from where I glimpsed Mr. Raccoon - through April 18.

As the word “dioramas’’ in the title indicates, Stein stages her photographs. She doesn’t imagine the scenes, though. Stein collects stories of wild animal encounters in Matamoras, either through conversations with residents or from articles in the local newspaper. She then reenacts the scenes, sometimes with live animals, sometimes with ones that have been stuffed and mounted. The images are startling - except that they’re not. That is, they have the stillness of taxidermy (and the people in them can look less natural than the animals do).

An ancillary pleasure of “Domesticated’’ is trying to guess which photographs show creatures in which state. The gulls attracted to a parking-lot feast consisting of a large order of Wendy’s fries and half a hamburger bun in “Fast Food’’ are clearly the real thing. The bear whom we see from behind staring at a little girl on a diving board in “Watering Hole’’ just as clearly is not. Or at least it better not be. Who can say, though, about the bobcat lolling on a log, with a highway viaduct in the distance, in “Riverside’’? He couldn’t look more languorous if his perch had been booked through Club Med.