It takes a few minutes to work out what’s awry about Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs. Nothing to do with poor focus or technique – quite the opposite, in fact. Shot in crisp monochrome and blown up huge, these 13 images of different creatures in their natural habitats – everything from wolves in an Arctic tundra to tortoises on a Galapagos shore – are so detailed and precise that it actually starts to seem rather uncanny. Nothing in nature is that still, that preternaturally perfect. And the same could be said about the compositions: with their inviting arrangements of animal life, these impeccably sublime views of sweeping mountains and fecund forests have more to do with traditions of landscape painting than professional wildlife photography. Indeed, if you peer closely into the distances, you’ll notice that some backgrounds do in fact appear to be painted.
For these aren’t, of course, photographs of nature at all. What they actually depict are museum dioramas: those life-size displays of stuffed animals and fake plants designed to educate us about natural history. Yet Sugimoto’s ongoing series shows us how profoundly unnatural these stage sets truly are. Starting with a 1976 portrait of a polar bear standing over a freshly killed seal, it’s never nature that the Japanese photographer is exploring so much as culture – how we, as humans, frame or romanticise the natural world, using it as a vehicle for our own longings and anxieties. The images also comment on photography itself – how, like the dioramas, each photograph seeks to freeze a single moment and fix it in time. Ultimately, the sense you get with these works is of a kind of profound, deathless preservation – a moment of pure artifice that’s at once deeply disquieting yet also wondrously spectacular.
Gabriel Coxhead