Reviews
The Japanese photographer's enormous black-and-white landscapes were made between 1976 and 2012 at natural-history museums. Their subjects are dioramas, displaying taxidermy animals and fake foliage against painted backdrops--dense layers of artifice, to which Sugimoto's photographs add yet another layer. Like so much of the artist's work, this series is conceptually brilliant, formally impressive, and ice cold. Which might be the point: we're so alienated from nature that even the dioramas staged to involve us in animal drama (warthog vs. ostrich, polar bear vs. seal) come off as empty, if elaborate, tableaux., A study in dioramas four decades in the making, Sugimoto's photographs explore the stylized reality of museum-made habitats and what they reveal about nature and the power of photography to document the natural world., Don't let the ease and beauty of Sugimoto's images fool you. Before you get the idea that you, too, can waltz into your local natural history museum and take photos like this, understand the painstaking amount of craft in each shot. Sugimoto captures his scenes with a large format camera and long exposures sometimes five minutes in length. He adjusts lights and whatever else necessary to bring the taxidermy to life--so successfully that the line between real and fake is often blurred., The Japanese photographer's enormous black-and-white landscapes were made between 1976 and 2012 at natural-history museums. Their subjects are dioramas, displaying taxidermy animals and fake foliage against painted backdrops-dense layers of artifice, to which Sugimoto's photographs add yet another layer. Like so much of the artist's work, this series is conceptually brilliant, formally impressive, and ice cold. Which might be the point: we're so alienated from nature that even the dioramas staged to involve us in animal drama (warthog vs. ostrich, polar bear vs. seal) come off as empty, if elaborate, tableaux., Perhaps the darkness struck me more than usual on a recent visit to the museum because I had just been looking at Hiroshi Sugimoto's new book, Dioramas, a collection of his elegant black and white photographs of dioramas, many of which were taken at the Museum of Natural History.Sugimoto uses long exposures, and the feeling I got from his work is just that: of observing something being exposed, something normally hidden, buried, and the uneasy sense that perhaps it was meant to remain hidden, undisturbed. The book with its smaller images is less intense. It's harder to decipher the surprises and ambiguities in the photographs, but they're there. The image on the cover of Dioramas is Sugimoto's photograph of the polar bear looming above a seal that lies, oblong and fat, beside a crack in the pure white ice. The other day, a guest saw the book in my living room and said, "Oh, cute!" then, a quick double take as he noticed the droplets of blood: "Oh dead.", Don't let the ease and beauty of Sugimoto's images fool you. Before you get the idea that you, too, can waltz into your local natural history museum and take photos like this, understand the painstaking amount of craft in each shot. Sugimoto captures his scenes with a large format camera and long exposures sometimes five minutes in length. He adjusts lights and whatever else necessary to bring the taxidermy to life-so successfully that the line between real and fake is often blurred., Perhaps the darkness struck me more than usual on a recent visit to the museum because I had just been looking at Hiroshi Sugimoto's new book, Dioramas, a collection of his elegant black and white photographs of dioramas, many of which were taken at the Museum of Natural History.Sugimoto uses long exposures, and the feeling I got from his work is just that: of observing something being exposed, something normally hidden, buried, and the uneasy sense that perhaps it was meant to remain hidden, undisturbed. The book with its smaller images is less intense. It's harder to decipher the surprises and ambiguities in the photographs, but they're there. The image on the cover of Dioramas is Sugimoto's photograph of the polar bear looming above a seal that lies, oblong and fat, beside a crack in the pure white ice. The other day, a guest saw the book in my living room and said, "Oh, cute!" then, a quick double take as he noticed the droplets of blood: "Oh… dead.", Perhaps the darkness struck me more than usual on a recent visit to the museum because I had just been looking at Hiroshi Sugimoto's new book, Dioramas, a collection of his elegant black and white photographs of dioramas, many of which were taken at the Museum of Natural History.Sugimoto uses long exposures, and the feeling I got from his work is just that: of observing something being exposed, something normally hidden, buried, and the uneasy sense that perhaps it was meant to remain hidden, undisturbed. The book with its smaller images is less intense. It's harder to decipher the surprises and ambiguities in the photographs, but they're there. The image on the cover of Dioramas is Sugimoto's photograph of the polar bear looming above a seal that lies, oblong and fat, beside a crack in the pure white ice. The other day, a guest saw the book in my living room and said, "Oh, cute!" then, a quick double take as he noticed the droplets of blood: "Oh... dead.", A Canadian lynx in fake snow, Alaskan brown bears towering over painted backdrops, and Cro-Magnon families building homes out of bones all appear in Hiroshi Sugimoto: Dioramas (Damiani, $65), which features highlights from those museum visits. Sugimoto continues to take diorama photos today, fascinated, as he writes, by the way they 'present us with something simultaneously dead and alive.'
