Why Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs museum dioramas to capture his vision of lost nature
In short: For forty years, photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has returned to the American Museum of Natural History to capture its habitat dioramas. By framing these three-dimensional displays, he explores the blurred lines between reality and fiction, using the museum's meticulous artistry to project his own idealistic visions of a world without humans.
Hiroshi Sugimoto first gained widespread acclaim in 1976 with his initial photographs of the museum's habitat dioramas. These displays, often called Windows on Nature, are celebrated globally as masterworks that fuse scientific accuracy with artistic expression. Sugimoto’s project is not merely documentation; it is a conceptual exploration of how we perceive the natural world through layers of representation. By using an 8 x 10 large-format camera, he captures images so lifelike that they appear to be taken on location in the wild rather than inside a museum hall.
The success of these photographs relies heavily on the original craftsmanship of the museum's preparators. These artists used taxidermy, painted backgrounds, and foreground construction to replicate specific sites. Interestingly, the museum staff originally relied on their own field photographs to build these scenes. Sugimoto notes the irony of this process: he is essentially re-photographing a scene that was already based on earlier photographs, creating a complex cycle of transformation that he finds conceptually compelling. This layering of reality and artifice is central to his artistic intent.
Sugimoto views these dioramas as tools to manifest his personal, idealistic vision of what nature should be. In his most recent work, he has focused on the theme of lost nature, imagining the state of the earth if human civilization were to vanish entirely. His enduring fascination with the museum's collection has led him to return four times over four decades, most recently documenting displays like the Olympic Forest in the Hall of North American Forests. His work continues to reach new audiences, with recent exhibitions held at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Pace Gallery.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Hiroshi Sugimoto: Four Decades of Photographing Dioramas
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