In 1976, Hiroshi Sugimoto set out to bring a taxidermied polar bear back to life. He had seen one on display in a diorama at the American Natural History Museum in New York (he has lived there and in Toyko since 1974). Finding all its stuffed animals and their realistic painted backdrops irresistible, he located some cumbersome 19th-century photography apparatus, the kind that would have been used when the dioramas were made, and photographed the scenes using a 20-minute exposure.
The giant, pristine black and white silver gelatin prints appear at first to be panoramic vistas of wildlife – but the details slowly unravel and betray them. The carnivorous polar bear, lurching towards its dead prey lying in a pool of blood on crisp snow, is too groomed – even its toenails looked polished. It all looks a bit off. For Sugimoto the work was a success, though. He had made the polar bear look alive once more.
