Elisa Schwalm
“Life/Death” examines the relationship of the notion of death in photography to the notion of death in the museum habitat diorama. Through the act of photographing, this space of immortal life is resurrected, flattening the divide between life and death. I am a person in awe of nature. Dioramas, an early tool of representation and education, were a way to see and understand nature, near and far, in all its “beauty and grandeur”. Whether the illusion was created precisely or deliberately has become less important today than it was in the past. Rather it is the movement from death to taxidermy, taxidermy to representation, representation to photographing that leads to a resurrection of the space, allowing the construct to live in a more contemporary context, taking it out of the museum and into different realms. For me, the end result is, a resurrection or reanimation of a time long past, whether accurate, precise or real. For Carl Akeley, the forefather of the habitat diorama, the quest to capture a reality through representation became an obsession with representing “the essence, the truth, the beauty, the ethos” of these natural spaces. What was ultimately revealed was the inherent limitations in using representation as tool for truth, the same limitations inherent in photography. The components of the scene are long ago past, both in time and as a tool of representation. Using different photographic devices to interrupt the illusion of space between past, present and future, there is a break in reality that anchors the viewer to the present while questioning the future.
Work by Elisa Schwalm. See more here.
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