Hiroshi Sugimoto

photographer

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s works seem to capture the Japanese notion of ‘aware’, a term that connotes surprise or delight, the aesthetic experience of ephemeral beauty, and the emotional awareness required for such an experience. I
n eight distinctive series, Sugimoto’s artistic career encompasses in-depth studies of sameness and difference, the natural and the man-made, and the principles of photographic vision. Sugimoto has often returned to his themes, adding to each series as inspiration and opportunity present themselves. His main themes and the corresponding years in which he initiated each series are Dioramas (1976), Wax Museums (1976), Theatres (1978), Seascapes (1980), Hall of Thirty-Three Bays (1995), Architecture (1997), In Praise of Shadows (1999), and Pine Landscapes (2001).
Sugimoto’s photographs of dioramas and figures from wax museums are often unsettling, as the artist uses photography to reinforce the sense of ‘reality’ in these staged settings. Sugimoto excludes the surrounding architecture, glass and labels to enhance the verisimilitude. The illusionistic spaces of the painted panoramic backgrounds are accommodated by focal points and technical solutions that do not appear to distort them. In his diorama and wax figure works, Sugimoto shows the unsettling verism of an illusion. The viewer is conditioned to believe that photography tells the ‘truth’, but Sugimoto shows that in photographing a fiction, all that remains is photographic ‘truth’. Sugimoto joked that he wanted to be ”the first sixteenth-century photographer” and makes (re)portraits of wax effigies of ”Henry VIII” (1999) and the monarch’s six wives.
Sugimoto uses large-format cameras and film to capture minute details and presents them in larger-than-life prints that have the gallery ‘presence’ of paintings (the wax figures are modelled on Renaissance paintings).
In the wax figure portraits, he uses black backgrounds and high-contrast lighting to heighten the eeriness of the figures – their human details and famous faces are familiar; yet stilted poses and patches of waxy ”skin” betray their source. Wax figure portraits of contemporaries he might have photographed are even stranger – figures such as ”Fidel Castro” (1999) or ”Pope John Paul II” (1999) bear the same realistic details and stigmas of fakery as the Renaissance figures.
In his photographs of dioramas from the American Museum of Natural History, Sugimoto seems to be the first prehistoric photographer, with works depicting a Cambrian seabed (1992) or the Ukrainian steppes inhabited by Cro-Magnon (1994). In his depictions of dioramas of extant animals, such as Stellar Sea Lions (1992), Sugimoto notes the irony of a man-made space constructed to show nature.
The emphasis on the central, bright screen reminds us that the theatre is essentially a camera on an architectural scale. The blank screens also draw the eye to the edges of the photographs, where one sees an ersatz architecture of fantasy in the Chinese, Islamic or baroque styles of early twentieth-century cinema palaces such as ”U.A. Walker, New York” (1978) or ”Akron Civic, Ohio” (1980). Since his first impressions of the subject, Sugimoto has expanded his investigations to include such spare, modern theatres as ”Arcadia, Milan” (1998) and drive-ins such as ”South Bay Drive-In, San Diego” (1993).
Each of Sugimoto’s seascapes has the same composition – equal halves of water and sky meet at a horizon. The locations are identified by their titles, but these titular differences seem arbitrary, reinforcing the notion that we are only seeing similar expanses of water. Each seascape varies according to fleeting light and weather conditions. For example, ”Caribbean Sea, Jamaica” (1980) has a clear, bright sky and well-defined waves, while ”Bay of Sagami, Atami” (1997) is atmospheric, with a blurred horizon and almost no detail. Sugimoto has photographed nocturnal seascapes, such as ‘Mirtoan Sea, Soúnion’ (1990), using only ambient starlight and moonlight to reveal wave patterns and celestial bodies subtly emerging from the dark silver gelatin abyss.
The Hall of Thirty-Three Bays series (1997) is a study of 1,000 Bodhisattva statues from the thirteenth-century Sanjusangen-do temple in Kyoto, Japan. Sugimoto cropped the temple’s architecture to show only the rows of similar golden statues in the early morning light. These photographs reveal subtle differences in the carving, positioning and wear of each Bodhisattva figure – their reflective gilding makes them appear radiant – literally enlightened. These variations reveal differences between the figures and Sugimoto’s many similar photographs. From these images, Sugimoto also produced a limited edition artist’s book, Sea of Buddha (1997).
In 1997, Sugimoto was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, to create images of modern architecture. Sugimoto’s solution was to photograph each canonical building out of focus, eliminating details and leaving only the building’s sculptural form. Like many of Sugimoto’s works, these images present an unfamiliar view of the familiar, icons such as the ‘Chrysler Building – William Van Allen’ (1997) and ‘Chapel Notre Dame du Haut – Le Corbusier’ slipping into barely recognisable abstraction.
Because these blurred images seem to dissolve the massive materiality of these structures, Sugimoto’s ”World Trade Center – Minoru Yamasaki” (1997) seems particularly poignant in light of the destruction of the towers in 2001. Since 1997, Sugimoto has continued to expand this series.
Sugimoto’s In Praise of Shadows consists of images of a traditional Japanese candle, the warousoku, burning down over several evening hours – the exposure lasts as long as the candle. The resulting images are varied white lines that run from the top to the bottom of the photograph. The brilliance of the flame, the flickering, the smoke and the breeze all affect the shape and value of this line. This series consists of photographs, photo-lithographs and installations.
Since 2001, Sugimoto has been photographing pine trees – Japanese symbols of immortality – in Tokyo’s Imperial Garden, referencing a famous sixteenth-century ink painting by Tohaku Hasegawa. As in the Thirty-Three Bays series, Sugimoto makes use of the early morning light. In works such as ”Pine Landscape” (2001), Sugimoto underexposes the shot, creating a shadowy, seemingly nocturnal image. These large-scale works are each made up of several images of different pines, juxtaposed so that they can be read as a photograph of a single pine grove. The artist used one of these pine landscapes as the backdrop for a collaborative theatre production, Noh Such Thing as Time (2001).