Subheadline:
At Lisson Gallery Chelsea, Hiroshi Sugimoto revisits the American Museum of Natural History’s dioramas, transforming constructed habitats into meditations on photography, illusion, memory, and the unstable boundary between nature and artifice.
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A polar bear stands against an Arctic landscape. Lions appear frozen beneath an imagined sky. A jaguar disappears into dense vegetation.
They look like photographs of nature.
They are not.
The animals are taxidermied. The landscapes are constructed. The skies are painted. The habitats belong to museum dioramas.
Yet through Hiroshi Sugimoto’s camera, these artificial worlds become uncannily convincing.
That paradox sits at the heart of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Unnatural Habitat, on view at Lisson Gallery’s Chelsea location from September 15 through October 24, 2026. The exhibition brings together works from Sugimoto’s celebrated Diorama series, recently rediscovered negatives enlarged for the first time, photographs made during his return to the American Museum of Natural History, and four new color works presented as traditional Japanese folding screens, or byōbu.
The Encounter That Changed Everything
Sugimoto first visited the American Museum of Natural History in 1975, two years after moving to New York.
The museum’s habitat dioramas immediately fascinated him.
These displays attempted to recreate distant ecosystems by combining painted environments with taxidermied animals and carefully constructed landscapes. They were artificial representations of nature, but their visual illusion was powerful enough to make the viewer momentarily accept them as real.
Sugimoto recognized an extraordinary photographic possibility.
If he photographed the dioramas correctly, the camera could erase many of the clues that exposed their artificiality.
The result became his Diorama series, an ongoing body of work that has remained central to his practice since the mid-1970s.
Photography, traditionally understood as a medium for documenting reality, became instead a tool for questioning it.
The First Photograph
Among the exhibition’s most important works is Polar Bear from 1975—the first image Sugimoto made as an artist.
Its significance extends beyond the subject.
The photograph represents the beginning of a five-decade investigation into what happens when an artificial image of reality is photographed and presented as an apparently authentic image of the world.
The viewer sees an animal.
The camera saw a museum display.
The photograph transforms that display again.
Reality becomes representation, representation becomes photography, and photography becomes a new form of visual reality.
That layered construction is what makes Sugimoto’s Diorama photographs so unsettling.
Fifty Years Later
Sugimoto returned to the American Museum of Natural History in 2025—exactly fifty years after his initial encounter with its dioramas.
That return is central to Unnatural Habitat.
Rather than treating the original series as a closed historical chapter, Sugimoto revisited the museum’s displays and produced new photographs, creating a dialogue between images made in the 1970s and works made half a century later.
One revealing example is Hunting Dogs.
Sugimoto first photographed the work in 1980. When he returned to the diorama in 2025, he noticed an uneven area of sky caused by a burned-out bulb inside the original display. He adjusted the image accordingly.
A tiny technical imperfection therefore became part of a much larger meditation on time.
The museum display had changed.
Sugimoto had changed.
The photograph had changed.
The relationship between all three had continued for decades.
Nature That Never Moves
The title Unnatural Habitat is deliberately paradoxical.
A habitat should be alive.
A diorama is preserved.
Its animals cannot move. Its weather cannot change. Its landscape remains fixed inside a glass case.
Sugimoto’s photograph introduces another layer of preservation.
The diorama freezes an imagined moment.
The photograph freezes the diorama.
The viewer encounters an image of a world that is simultaneously natural-looking and completely constructed.
This makes the series less about animals than about human attempts to represent nature.
Sugimoto does not simply photograph wildlife.
He photographs the human desire to reconstruct wildlife.
The Strange Authority of Photography
Sugimoto’s images are particularly compelling because they exploit photography’s reputation for truth.
We are accustomed to treating photographs as evidence.
A photograph appears to say: this existed; therefore, this must be true.
Sugimoto complicates that assumption.
His photographs prove that something was in front of the camera—but they do not necessarily tell us what that something was.
The camera can record an illusion with complete accuracy.
That distinction feels particularly relevant in 2026, when digital manipulation, synthetic imagery and AI-generated visuals have made the question of photographic truth increasingly complicated.
Sugimoto’s project, however, began long before those technologies became part of everyday visual culture.
His dioramas remind us that artificial reality did not begin with artificial intelligence.
It began with the human impulse to construct believable images.
From Black-and-White to Color
Unnatural Habitat also introduces a significant development in Sugimoto’s photographic language.
Four new color diorama photographs are presented as traditional Japanese folding screens, or byōbu.
Printed on washi paper and produced using traditional Kyoto craftsmanship, the works move photography beyond the conventional framed image.
This is only the second major use of color in Sugimoto’s photographic practice, following his Opticks series.
For an artist whose Diorama images have been strongly associated with precise black-and-white photography, the introduction of color changes the emotional and perceptual character of the work.
But the format may be even more important than the color.
A folding screen is not simply an image attached to a wall.
It occupies space.
It folds, bends and divides architecture.
It can function simultaneously as picture, object and spatial structure.
Sugimoto therefore turns the photograph into something closer to sculpture.
The Museum Display Becomes an Artwork
This transformation creates a fascinating chain of authorship.
The museum constructs a habitat.
The taxidermist preserves an animal.
The designer creates an environment.
Sugimoto photographs the result.
The gallery presents the photograph.
And the viewer reconstructs the entire illusion through perception.
At every stage, nature is being mediated.
The exhibition consequently asks viewers to consider not only what photography shows but also everything that happens before the shutter is pressed.
New York, Seen Through Time
The exhibition also has a deeply personal relationship with New York.
Sugimoto arrived in the city in the early 1970s and became connected to its Conceptual art scene. Before establishing his career as an artist, he sold Japanese antiques in SoHo, an experience that brought him into contact with influential artists of the period.
His relationship with New York therefore predates the international recognition of his photography.
Unnatural Habitat brings that history back into focus.
A museum on the Upper West Side became the source of an artistic investigation that began in 1975.
Half a century later, the same museum became the site of Sugimoto’s return.
The resulting photographs now appear in Chelsea.
Three different New York locations—museum, studio and gallery—become connected through a single photographic idea.
A Broader Practice of Time
Sugimoto’s interest in artificial environments is part of a much larger investigation into time, perception and memory.
Across his practice, he has repeatedly returned to subjects and visual systems over long periods, including dioramas, seascapes, wax figures and studies of light.
His method is fundamentally serial.
He photographs the same kinds of subjects again and again, allowing differences in time and perception to become visible.
That makes Unnatural Habitat less like a conventional retrospective and more like a continuation of an experiment.
The question remains open.
How much can an image change while its subject remains essentially the same?
When the Artificial Becomes More Convincing Than Reality
There is something almost cinematic about Sugimoto’s dioramas.
The scenes contain characters, landscapes and implied narratives, but nothing moves.
The animals are permanently frozen.
The sky never changes.
There is no beginning and no ending.
Photography completes the illusion by giving the scene another kind of permanence.
The strange result is that an artificial habitat can become emotionally more convincing than the real thing.
We know the image is constructed.
We still believe it.
And perhaps that is the point.
The Quiet Power of Unnatural Habitat
Unnatural Habitat does not need spectacle to produce uncertainty.
Its power comes from stillness.
The photographs are quiet, precise and apparently straightforward. But the longer they are observed, the more unstable their reality becomes.
A landscape becomes a museum display.
A museum display becomes a photograph.
A photograph becomes a memory.
And memory becomes a question about what was ever real in the first place.
At Lisson Gallery Chelsea, Hiroshi Sugimoto turns one of the oldest functions of the museum—preserving and representing the natural world—into a profound meditation on photography itself.
Fifty years after he first encountered the American Museum of Natural History’s dioramas, the artist is still asking us to look again.
Not at nature.
But at the image of nature.
And at the extraordinary human desire to make that image believable.
