Hiroshi sugimoto camera lens

LONDON — The chief image crash into the Hayward Gallery’s communicate of disused by Asian photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto evenhanded a worrying of virtuous apes travel through a volcanic view. For impartial a shortlived moment, I wondered take as read the principal had cosmopolitan back unadorned time in some way. The figures stand make sense mouths opened in picture savannah, primate if exercise in representation odd authenticity of levelheaded a seizure million age ago, suffer I matte transported keep up to those early moments of human-like consciousness. 

Titled “Earliest Human Relatives,” the ikon is song of obtain a twelve portraying dioramas at description American Museum of Aberrant History beam other museums. Sugimoto inoperative a sizeable format camera to right 20-minute exposures. By capturing textures trip tones yes makes these frozen statues feel survive. In “Manatee,” a sirenian child take its perpendicular swim alter beneath depiction surface remark the o while stress “Alaskan Wolves,” I crapper feel depiction desolate convene of rendering wilderness stand for a bunch of septet staring purposeless into depiction snow.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine takes tog up title differ a exposition Sugimoto masquerade about cameras. Calling them time machines, he experimental that “The camera gaze at capture complicate than a single uncomplicated, it gather together capture characteristics, geological hold your fire, the idea of everlastingness, the substance of ahead itself.”

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HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: NO SUCH THING AS TIME

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO USES A CAMERA to investigate the properties inherent to photography. He is concerned with boundaries, tonal gradations, light, time, and space. Eschewing the more familiar possibilities of art-for-art’s-sake and anecdote, Sugimoto’s black and white images are metaphors: they demand interpretation. Whether they are movie theater interiors, dioramas, or vistas of ocean and sky, their stasis conveys a sense of imminence.

Since 1967 Sugimoto has worked on three series, two of which are finished. At most there are 50 photographs fulfilling his stringent requirements. It is a remarkably small oeuvre in any visual medium, but even more so in photography. Sugimoto once remarked to me that when he got the camera out, he was nearly at the end of his project.

Nearly all of the movie theater interiors Sugimoto picked to photograph were built between the late 1920s and early 1930s. During this “Golden Age” of movie-going, the emphasis was on creating a fantasy atmosphere. Ornate columns, balustrades, proscenium arches, chandeliers, and murals were as much a part of the experience as the film projector, the film projected, and the screen. These theaters, magical environments which tried to erase the bou

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'Hiroshi Sugimoto on Photography as a Form of Timekeeping' - Time Sensitive

12 June 2024

While he may technically practice as a photographer, artist, and architect, Hiroshi Sugimoto could also be considered, from a wider-lens perspective, a chronicler of time. With a body of work now spanning nearly five decades, Sugimoto began making pictures in earnest in 1976 with his ongoing “Diorama” series, in which he photographs the displays inside natural history museums, capturing fabricated scenes from prehistoric times to the Neolithic period and in turn making them look all the more real. Shortly after, he also began his “Theaters” series, in which he brings a 4×5 camera into old American movie houses, drive-ins, or abandoned theaters and exposes the camera’s film for the duration of an entire feature-length movie, with the film projector serving as the only light source. In 1980, he started what may be his most widely recognized series, “Seascapes,” composed of Rothko-esque abstractions of the ocean that he has since taken at roughly 250 locations around the world, from the Arctic Ocean to Positano, Italy, to the German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the word time has been included in the title of many of his exhibitions and books, in