Fifty Years Photographing Dioramas, and the Last One in Colour

Hiroshi Sugimoto began photographing the habitat groups at the American Museum of Natural History in 1975, on a premise he found at the start: a diorama reads as convincingly alive through a lens and not to the eye. Zoe Lescaze follows the project to its close in the autumn of 2025, sets it against Carl Akeley's conservation driven taxidermy and against museums swapping habitat groups for interactive displays, and reports that the final shoot was his first in colour, where a bird sanctuary group that had held its camouflage in black and white gave the birds up.