Devonian Period

Hiroshi Sugimoto (b.1948) is a multidisciplinary artist, who is best known for his photography and architecture. Sugimoto’s photographic exhibitions double as art installations, and are described by the artist as ‘space sculpture’. [1] Throughout his career, Sugimoto has used the camera to investigate the passage of time and to raise questions about the nature of perceived ‘reality’. For Sugimoto, the camera is a time-recording device and ‘photography functions as a fossilization of time’. [2]

This black and white photograph titled Devonian Period, depicting the emergence of prehistoric aquatic life around 400 million years ago, is from Sugimoto’s Dioramas series. Taken in 1992, the photograph was reproduced for The Origins of Love portfolio in 2004.

Sugimoto began his Dioramas series in 1976 and explored this theme over four decades. Responding to the artificial displays at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, in this series Sugimoto uses photography to invest a museum’s taxidermy animals and plastic scenery with a vitality and authenticity that they do not possess in real life.

“When I first arrived in New York in 1974, I visited many of the city’s tourist sites, one of which was the American Museum of Natural History. I made a curious discovery while looking at the exhibition of animal dioramas: the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I had found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.” [3]

Dioramas perform a didactic function in the context of the museum, and it is tempting to search for a Darwinian explanation of human evolution among these photos. Instead of offering a linear version of time, Sugimoto’s series explores the cycle of life and death on earth, and charts both the emergence and extinction of humankind. Sugimoto articulates his own history of the world’s creation, destruction and regeneration in the photobook titled Dioramas. [4]

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