Summer [ History ]
Five-thousand years ago, humankind began domesticating animals, cultivating crops and inventing written scripts to record events, thereby initiating history and civilization as we know it. As food production came to surpass immediate consumption, the dominion of surplus reserves and available labor gave rise to social classes and the complexification of society. Animal skins gave way to woven cloth, which in turn diversified into emblems of the wearer’s personal status. By the early 19th century, fashion became an historical indicator the cultural drive of modernizing society. The photo series Stylized Sculpture featuring select pieces from the historical reference collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute is displayed on a fashion show stage, inviting us to review the spectacle that was the Modern Age.

Further, the Diorama series First Visitors’ Guide presents an informative “welcome” to planetary history for extraterrestrials visiting our earth, by means of scene-by-scene dramatizations of everything from the emergence of Cambrian Period lifeforms to the birth of hominids to the stone age to the present day.

Hiroshi Sugimoto