Explain the intended significance of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photo Henry VIII

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

The ideal response will include the following:
Japanese-born New York photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto was commissioned in 1999 to make a series of portraits of famous people from history using figures found in waxworks museums around the world. At Madame Tussauds in London, he found figures of Henry VIII and his six wives based on paintings from the Tudor era, including one of Hans Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII. Sugimoto posed the wax figures in three-quarter profile and photographed them in black and white against black ground, consciously trying to replicate the lighting of the original paintings. Of course, none of these subjects could ever have been photographed; in photographing the waxworks, Sugimoto is calling into question the association of photography with recording the truth. These photographs are not just at one remove from their subjects, but three—from the actual historical personage, to the Tudor-era painting, to the waxwork museum’s recreations, to Sugimoto’s photograph.