wunderkammer
ドイツ語のWunderkammer（Wunder=wonder，kammer=room）が「不思議の部屋，驚異の部屋」が，ここでは形容詞として使われている例です。元々は前帝国主義の時代に，自分たちの文化にはない珍品を蒐集し陳列した列強の支配者が自らのコレクションを陳列した部屋のことを指しました。まあ，ある意味，大英博物館はその公共版といってもよいのかもしれません。（UG）
‘Fossilizing’ With a Camera
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Hiroshi Sugimoto photographing diorama displays that get extra attention before a shoot in Manhattan.
In a corner of his airy studio looking down on the High Line in Chelsea, Hiroshi Sugimoto maintains a kind of private natural history museum, a choice paring from the immense collection of wunderkammer artifacts he has amassed since becoming one of the art world’s most successful photographers.
Hiroshi Sugimoto goes over details before shooting a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. He had to plan extensively for a recent one-day shoot at the museum. There is a speckled shard of moon rock. There is a soccer-ball-size chunk of iron meteorite that fell in Namibia, almost too heavy to hoist off the windowsill where it now sits. There are fossilized dinosaur eggs that look like props from “Alien.” And there is a small manmade object that Mr. Sugimoto fetched from a cabinet on a recent afternoon: an Egyptian cat sarcophagus from around 200 B.C., with the elegantly cast form of the memorialized feline perched atop the sealed rectangular bronze box.
He handed it to a visitor and told him to shake it. Something dry rattled around inside, making a sad, ancient maraca sound. “It’s in there but we’ll never be able to see it,” he said, smiling placidly. Like many contemporary photographers, Mr. Sugimoto’s work grapples with questions of perception and photography’s claims to truth. But his interests have always reached further, to an almost scientific concern with time and time’s inconvenient companion, mortality.
