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  • The Paris Review

    Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Portraits Bring the Dead Back to Life

    by The Paris Review Feb 28, 2018 1 minute

    Hiroshi Sugimoto, Norma Shearer, 1994. All photos courtesy of Damiani.

    Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent a career photographing fictions. When he moved to New York from Japan in 1974, by way of Los Angeles, he intended from his “Dioramas” series, for example, shows a stuffed polar bear on a faux icescape, looming over a seal, its teeth bared, as though ready to strike. Twice removed from its natural setting, the scene unfreezes. It could easily be confused for a photo of a real bear, a real icescape. “My life as an artist began,” Sugimoto writes, “when I saw with my own eyes that I had succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film.”

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