The limited edition includes a signed silver gelatin photograph of his fossil series in an edition of twenty-five, as well as a limited edition of the revue featuring Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 2014, as special cover.

Each limited edition revue is signed by the artist adjacent to In Praise of Shadow 980906, a special acetate and lithograph print created specially by the artist for Cahiers d’Art.

The French edition includes the silver gelatin print PPTRD 005, and the English edition includes PPTRD 040. Both are editions of twenty-five.

                     The Fossil: Pre-Photography Time-Recording Devices

                                               By Hiroshi Sugimoto

Compared to painting and to sculpture, photography is a newcomer as an art medium. Even before the invention of photography in the early nineteenth century, there already existed a wonderful medium capable of recording the past with great precision. This pre-photography time-recording device was the fossil. If we allow the technology of the fossil to be an art, then fossils can be characterized justifiably as the world’s oldest art form. Indeed, fossils have been around for eons and long predate the human race and its ability to appreciate art.

Fossils are the result of natural cataclysms. They are created when something vibrantly alive is instantaneously extinguished and entombed by an earthquake, landslide, subsea volcanic eruption, or meteor impact. The earth and ash heaped on top of the thing stamp out the impression of its shape like a carved seal; then, over the course of tens or hundreds of millions of years, that shape becomes embedded in sedimentary layers and turns to stone. When you split the strata, the layer on top is the negative image, while the fossilized life form appears as the positive image.

It was when I was photographing an undersea diorama that re-created the Cambrian era of 545 million years ago that the insight first came to me: The trilobite in that diorama had been re-created from a fossil. And by photographing it, I was fossilizing it for a second time.
Taking a photograph, I realized, is to fossilize the present day.