When I first saw Brandon Hall’s natural history museum pictures, I was highly intrigued, and not only because I had just booked my own trip to the diorama destination of my dreams where Hall’s pictures are made, New York’s American Museum of Natural History. Hall’s diorama pictures, which are made by double exposure, are about duality. On a personal level, the images portray Hall’s “dualism of the mind;” he had just relocated to New York City and his thoughts were never focused on his physical whereabouts. The doubling and flipping of the taxidermy animals is a literal representation of how Hall was feeling in his new space. He says, “I was one person but at the same time there were two different sides of me at play.” Regarding the dioramas themselves, the dualities described are between life and death, representation and caricature, natural and unnatural. The pictures created are quite unique, fascinating, and disorienting to look at.
From “Museums of Unnatural History”
Visit artist's site: brandonmichaelhallphotography.com
Posted October 13th, 2014
