A Room Within a Room of Her Own

This project began in the summer of 2017 when I had recently returned from a photographic excursion in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. I had been considering ideas related to the experience of the natural landscape, and having been drawn to one image in particular, I produced a large print to keep my thoughts in focus.  It was a generic sort of landscape, embracing some near detail as well as a distant view, and as it was photographed through and also included the large window structure framing it, the characteristics of the landscape met with its deliberate housing and suggested the space of a diorama. Living with this image in my studio, I thought of the dioramas of my youth and made the decision to revisit the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. It was wonderful to see these constructed wonders again, and I couldn’t resist photographing several of them; I was taken with the multiple readings encouraged by the layered imagery reflected in their glass encasings, and I remember thinking that I was grateful for these composite views as they distinguished themselves from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s celebrated but more pristine diorama images from New York’s American Museum of Natural History that were impossible not to recall. 

During this visit, I learned that the ANS had plans to open and clean two of its originally sealed dioramas from the 1930s. Intrigued but not initially knowing  why, I returned for several months during 2018, embarking on an extended photographic project that documented each critically altering moment in the dismantling and reassembling of the Gorilla and Takin dioramas, the two chosen for this undertaking.  I was often astounded by the unexpected images; the changing site never met with what I imagined in advance of each visit, and the repeated surprises kept me involved for the duration of the restoration.  The developing project reflected on the original conservation impulses along with our ongoing relationship to the landscape and the natural world which, like these dated dioramas, were in need of a good dusting and much reconsideration.  The images evoked unintended narratives, expanding the possibility of understanding the original purposes of those who created the dioramas, as well as the latent readings waiting to be discovered by those who continue to observe them today.

What was particularly compelling for me was the way the photographs, unmanipulated as they were, appeared as acts of the imagination, inventions by the artist, all the while being found moments in a process that I was witnessing, making the act of attention central to the project and enhancing my own notions regarding documentation. The layered narratives kept growing as I continued to photograph the deconstruction then reconstruction of these sites, with the most arresting images being those that offered alternatives to the apparent narratives with which each of the dioramas was conceived.

This project is ongoing…