132DIORAMASbetween the “real” and the “fake” is exacerbated by the photographer’s
disentangling of the image from any museological context. The black
and white of his images augments a sense of naturalness in the scene
that is nonetheless far from any realistic representation of nature,
while the balanced composition of the diorama still reveals the work
of decorum. Karen Knorr has photographically deterritorialized taxi-
dermy animals, taking them from their diorama stages to the interiors
of different buildings around the world. She engages animal forms in
aesthetically intriguing dialectic relationships with architecture, an op-
eration that short-circuits the nature/culture dichotomy through the
problematizing approach of digital photography, in which conceptions
of reality are relentlessly revisioned. Meanwhile, Diane Fox has focused
her attention on the glass that separates the scenery from the viewer in
order to derail the metanarratives of purification and redemption that
dioramas embody (fig. 3.8). The reflections that Fox captures produce
paradoxical “double exposure effects”—awkward representational mo-
ments that fragment both the realistic unity of the picture’s plane and its
allusive powers.^89
FIGURE 3.8 Diane Fox, Deer, 2008. The Slovak National Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia.
© Diane Fox.