Hiroshi Sugimoto developed his first photographic series in 1974 when discovering the dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Struck by the artificiality of the set up, he realizes that the illusion would be more convicing through the lens of a photographic camera assumed to always carry the stark reality. This book gathers for the first time the totality of this founding series which launched Sugimoto’s career, enriched with around ten recent photographs (2012).

First title of a collection of five books on Sugimoto’s major series : Dioramas (2014), Seascapes (2015), followed by Theaters, Architecture, Lightning Fields will be published for the first time in French and in an expanded version.