Cro-Magnon

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 Cro-Magnon, depicting a human species that lived between 40 thousand and 10 thousand years ago, is from Sugimoto’s Dioramas series. Taken in 1994, 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.

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. Any linear display of Sugimoto’s photographs of the great apes is problematic, for reasons articulated by Yuval Noah Harari.

“It’s a common fallacy to envision these species as arranged in a straight line of descent, with Ergaster begetting Erectus, Erectus begetting the Neanderthals, and the Neanderthals evolving into us. This linear model gives the mistaken impression that at any particular moment only one type of human inhabited the earth, and that all earlier species were merely older models of ourselves. The truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around10,000 years ago, the world was home at one and the same time, to several human species.” [4]

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