Seeing Stars: Reading Melancholy and Power at Madame Tussauds through the Lens of Hiroshi Sugimoto

In a hallway of the London Madame Tussauds, the wax figures which are the chief attraction for most visitors overlap with two of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of wax subjects from his Portraits series. Decorated with old-fashioned flocked wallpaper, the passage contains a number of vintage Tussauds advertisements and newspaper clippings. Few visitors entered the space when I visited the wax museum, since using it meant bypassing the special room devoted to popular singer Kylie Minogue. The two Sugimoto prints, which were unlabelled, hung halfway down the hall-way. One is of Queen Elizabeth I, the other of Princess Diana (Fig. 1, Fig. 2).