The production and distribution of hunting photographs is a sub-genre that has existed since the birth of field photography. Artist Oscar Holloway explores the subjects of hunting, natural history, conservation, and the nature of the processed image in Dioramas, an exhibition currently on show at Divus London.
Curated by Lisa Kim, Dioramas presents Holloway’s appropriation of existing hunting photographs. The original pictures are of the hunter with his game, propping the lifeless animal’s head up or holding it by its antlers or neck. Holloway methodically erases the hunter from the image, leaving the animal in a state of self-suspension in a retouched photographic landscape. The removal of the human presence results in a radically different image of a tranquil animal in slumber, at peace in its natural environment. Some larger prints evoke Sir Edwin Landseer’s spirited stag paintings, while other images are more ambiguous, touching on the banality of the act.
The title of the exhibition links the resulting stasis and artifice in Holloway’s manipulated images to the diorama, a scientific spectacle device perfected in the 1920s in institutions like the American Museum of Natural History or the Chicago Field Museum. These dioramas contain taxidermies, presenting a frozen image of the wilderness. Paradoxically, while the exhibited specimens had to be shot down, one major result of this was the rise of the conservation movement, which benefited certain species from (at least indexical) extinction.
Installation view. Courtesy of Gili Yuval
Oscar Holloway, Dingo (after Bazin), 2015.
Courtesy of Lisa Kim
Oscar Holloway, 082xs.jpg, 2014.
Courtesy of Oscar Holloway
Oscar Holloway, 2000, 2014.
Courtesy of Oscar Holloway
Oscar Holloway, CU27 2014.jpg.
Courtesy of Oscar Holloway
Courtesy of Lisa Kim
by Louise Lui
Dioramas is on until February 21,, 2015 at Divus London
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