Hiroshi Sugimoto Transforms the Motionless

Abstract

While the average contemporary photographer creates a snapshot in time, Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) is unique in his ability to create life where there is none. Sugimoto photographed scenes of dioramas from natural history museums across America. Through his technical and artistic skill, as well as his ability to play off of the viewer’s expectation of photography, Sugimoto’s series, Dioramas, 1976-2014, are full of life even though the subjects themselves are not alive. From its inception in 1839, photography has been a tool to document the world as it is known and typically captures the image of a person, place, or object in situ. Sugimoto takes advantage of the viewer’s pre-conceived notion that the photograph must have been taken as it happened. The way Sugimoto frames the scene along with careful, intentional viewpoints creates an image that puts the viewer at the scene at what seems to be the actual moment in time. The artist’s use of black and white creates contrast and starkness within the images, which drifts towards timelessness, reckoning back to the early days of photography before color photography was introduced. In real life, the visitor experiences a fabricated scene, but Sugimoto’s photographs make the scene seem more alive than in person. In Dioramas, Sugimoto creates a sense of movement within the photographs by using a snapshot aesthetic with the edges of the scene cut off, by choosing to print in black and white, and by playing off viewers’ assumptions that a photographer is a documentarian.