Have you ever wondered what it would be like to take photographs of a movie while you are watching it? Well, that is how the famed photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto got his start. He was in a theatre that happened to be showing an Audrey Hepburn flick, and so he took some still shots of the movie as it was playing (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, web). That was just the first instance of Sugimoto finding innovative ways to represent the reality he sees in the world around him.
It was when Sugimoto was 28 years old that his first formal series of work came out. That might seem like a long time after high school, but sometimes it takes a long time for creative efforts to turn into something that artists want to publish. This series was called Dioramas. To make it, he went into several different history museums and shot diorama (three-dimensional) exhibits that were designed to simulate reality. Some examples included some primates hanging out in a simulated jungle and vultures showing interest in some carcasses (Gopnik, web). The American Museum of Natural History was the site of a lot of these shoots, and when the museum put up other dioramas in subsequent years, he came back and shot some of them too (Kennedy, web). If you take a look at some of the photographs in this series, you will see that the perspective on them is really short so that you might think you are looking at a real shot from nature. However, if you go up (if you are at a museum) or if you look at the online description of the picture, you will see that it is not a real scene.
Do you remember earlier in the paper when I mentioned that Sugimoto took some of his first pictures of images of Audrey Hepburn? That was not the end of his looking at movie theatres. In the series Theatres, he would find movie houses and drive-in theatres from several decades ago and go inside. Once a show was about to start, he would get out a folding camera and put it on a tripod, and then he would open the shutter so that the entire movie would play to the exposed film (Yeoh, web). If you look at the pictures in this series, you will see an eerie rectangle of light (from where the screen is), and around it you can see (depending on the theatre) either some of the surrounding building (including the seats) or the drive-through lot in front of the camera.
Have you ever looked out to sea, all the way to that thin line where the sky and the sea seem to make a connection that looks like the end of the world? Then you are familiar with what you would see if you took a look at the Seascapes series. When we take pictures with digital cameras, exposure is not something that we normally think about. Sugimoto used a large-format camera for this series and used exposures as long as three hours (Pagel, web). If you take a look at this exhibit, you will see images from such places as the English Channel, the Norwegian Sea, the Black Sea and even the Arctic Ocean. You will notice that the horizon forms the exact middle of each image.
If you are a fan of photography, maybe you have seen images that photographers have taken of architectural buildings. Sugimoto took many photographs of architectural works, but in many cases he would change some of the visual elements to make a unique shot. This happened when he shot Sanjusangen-do in 1995. He focused on the bodhisattvas in the building – and there were 1,000 of them. They had been in the building since between 1100 and 1300, and they had had gold paint applied to them. He took some more pictures of famous buildings around the world after he got a commission from a museum in Chicago.
Have you ever seen something that you just had to take a picture of? Maybe even take a selfie with it? Well then you have an idea of what happened to Sugimoto one day when he was in St. Louis in 2003. He was in town to shoot the Pulitzer Foundation of the Arts, but he saw Richard Serra’s sculpture Joe. If you know anything about Claude Monet, the Impressionist painter, you probably know that he painted the same scene at different times of day to show the different ways the light played on the scene. Sugimoto did something similar, shooting the sculpture over five days with short exposure (Blum, web). The blurred photos were on gelatin-silver paper to highlight the metal from the sculpture and make it the focus for the viewer.
In recent years, Sugimoto has had some of his work appear in the sphere of popular culture. The 2009 U2 album No Line on the Horizon features his photograph Boden Sea, Uttwil on the cover. He also found some negatives dating back to the 1840s that the early photographer Henry Fox Talbot had taken. He transformed these into a set of images that look “remarkably like Plato’s shadows in the cave” (Cumming, web). In the years since 2009, he has published more images that show a broad range of artistic techniques.
Sugimoto has also received requests to design buildings of a variety of types (Day, web). However, he does not have architectural training or licensing, so he brought in three licensed architects to work with him as he designed such places as a Shinto shrine, a rock and sculpture garden for a Tokyo restaurant, a trendy French restaurant in the Kiyoharu Art Village, and a glass teahouse for a biennial architecture exposition in Venice (Day, web).
Given the wealth of exhibitions that Sugimoto has used to portray his work, his photographs and architectural designs have clearly resonated as meditations on the way we live and the way we see the world around us. His works appear all over the world, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Paris’ Pompidou Centre; Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and many more.
Works Cited
Blum, Andrew. “Art Capturing Art Capturing Art Capturing” New York Times 17 September
2006. Web. 20 March 2016.
Cumming, Laura. “Hiroshi Sugimoto; The Queen, Art and Image; Elizabeth Blackadder; Ingrid
Calame” The Guardian 14 August 2012. Web. 20 March 2016.
Day, Lara. “Hiroshi Sugimoto Designs Own Museum.” Wall Street Journal 23 January 2014. Web.
20 March 2016.
Gopnik, Blake. “Hiroshi Sugimoto, Emphasizing the Play of Shadow and Lie.” Washington Post
20 February 2006. Web. 20 March 2016.
Kennedy, R. “’Fossilizing’ with a Camera.” New York Times 8 October 2012. Web. 20 March
2016.
Pagel, David. “A Focus on Tranquility.” Los Angeles Times 18 December 1997. Web. 20 March
2016.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. “Hiroshi Sugimoto.” n.d. Web. 20 March 2016.
Sugimoto, Hiroshi. “Architecture.” n.d. Web. 20 March 2016.
Yeoh, Peter. “Capturing Light – Hiroshi Sugimoto Reveals the Essence of His Life’s Work.” Glass
Magazine 2: 174-179.
