SUGIMOTO, Hiroshi - Dioramas

Background information

"Hiroshi SUGIMOTO began to photograph his 'Dioramas' series, a body of work that spans almost four decades, when he moved to New York City from Japan in 1974.  While looking at the galleries in the 'American Museum of Natural History', he noticed that if he looked at the dioramas with one eye closed, the artificial scenes of prehistoric humans, dinosaurs, and taxidermied wild animals set in elaborately painted backgrounds looked utterly convincing. This visual trick launched his conceptual exploration of the photographic medium, which continues today. Through his career, Hiroshi SUGIMOTO has addressed the photograph's power to create a history. He has said, 'photography functions as a fossilization of time.' In the 'Dioramas' series, SUGUMOTO persuades the viewer that the photographer has captured a lived moment in time, although each scene is an elaborately crafted fiction. The photo volume 'Dioramas' by Japanese photographer Hiroshi SUGIMOTO narrates a story of the cycle of life, death and rebirth, from prehistoric aquatic life to the propagation of reptile and animal life to homo sapiens' destruction of the earth and then to a renewal of the earth, where flora and fauna flourish without man.  Here Hiroshi SUGIMOTO writes his own history of the world, an artist's creation myth." (© Damiani, 2014)

Book review & Content

"The Japanese photographer Hiroshi SUGIMOTO’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." (© Andrea Scott)

About the Japanese photographer, Hiroshi SUGIMOTO (b. 1948, in Tokyo)

Photo books by and with contribution by Hiroshi SUGIMOTO