Artist 5: "Dioramas" (1976) by Hiroshi Sugimoto

       I find that I have a strong connection to the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, and find pleasure in that we share similar interests in dada and marcel duchamp. after reading a bit about his philosophy on photography and art, I can only draw similar conclusions about the medium; like sugimoto, I like to think of my artistic photography to be concerned with the transience of life and the human understanding of time, and a majority of my photographs seem to serve as capsules that neatly package emotional and physical memories into blocks of color and line, a physical means of storing thoughts and feelings that also relieves the artist of the burden of the vision.

       Other elements of Sugimoto's work that resonate with me is the variety of imagery in his body of work, organized by themed series, and his seeming technical mastery of large format photography; his long daylight exposures are a testament to his ability to photograph both the natural and mad-made world.

       Like the majority of his professional work, Sugimoto's Diorama photographs are carefully composed and extremely cinematic; instead of enhancing the artificiality of the museum display, the simple, hand-painted backdrops behind the figures serve to enhance the viewing experience, providing little-to-no distraction while gently guiding the viewers eye through the image and framing the subject(s) in their "natural" environment.

       Of the series i've been able to see (mostly on the internet), I find his 1976 series Dioramas to be one of my favorite; his use of pre-existing, carefully crafted and composed museum dioramas is brilliant and testament to the artist's creativity and resourcefulness, and his soft, emotive black-and-white imagery seems to remove the artificiality of these museum settings to create compelling glimpses into natural history as if the viewer were somehow able to witness them firsthand. I find this use of "found material" to be highly amusing, and a creative response to the need to create the specific image (and satisfy the artist's inner vision of the world), and serves to tie the related, but separate, disciplines of sculpture, history, and photography into a single, cohesive experience for the viewer, unencumbered by "facts" and the "impossible" feat of photographing early homonids walking across the Serengeti.

     Furthermore, the image of the polar bear and his freshly-killed seal is a captivating and compelling image that very few humans would be able to experience first hand, as the polar bear is one of the largest and most fearsome mammalian predators on the face of the earth, and even knowing that its a stuffed-and-mounted taxidermic specimen, i cant shake the level of hyper-realism and emotional/physical tension created by this image.