Hiroshi Sugimoto: Dioramas

(Hardback)

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Description

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--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, 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, Sugimoto persuades the viewer that the photographer has captured a lived moment in time, although each scene is an elaborately crafted fiction. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Dioramas 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 Sugimoto writes his own history of the world, an artist's creation myth.

Reviews

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."--Cathleen Schine "The New York Review of Books"

Author Bio

Born in Tokyo in 1948, Sugimoto left Japan in 1970 after graduating fromRikkyo University with a degree in economics. He traveled throughoutthe Soviet Union and Europe and then moved to Los Angeles, wherehe studied photography at the Art Center College of Design. His workhas been exhibited internationally in group and solo shows, and hewas the recipient of the Hasselblad Foundation International Award inPhotography in 2001 and the Mainichi Art Prize in 1988. He currently livesin New York and Tokyo.