Morrill Hall
I have always loved animals. These dioramas are beautiful recreations of nature scenes, places I could never go and animals I would probably never see, but it’s impossible to ignore the actuality of the fact that in order to construct them, these animals were killed, stuffed, and then arranged into lifelike poses. The great irony is that the reality these dioramas represent was destroyed in order to create them. The nature that once lived is now encapsulated and objectified. In this way photographs and dioramas are similar, each try to show a frozen moment in time. The tintypes themselves with their reflective surfaces mimic the glass on the dioramas. But, as reality is dynamic and in continuous motion neither medium is truly capable of recreating the experience. So as there was once nature and living creatures there are these dioramas, likewise through my photography there was once a diorama and now there are tintypes, each a new layer of façade removed from reality.
