Dioramas

Shortly after arriving in New York in 1974, while wandering in the American Museum of Natural History, Sugimoto discovered the Victorian-era dioramas illustrating animal habitats. It was a revelation: “The stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real.” He began photographing the displays in their glass cases, hoping to “bring dead nature back to life.”

Sugimoto’s first diorama subject was Polar Bear (1976). Using an old large-format camera and black-and-white film, he set up his apparatus like a nineteenth-century photographer, making careful lighting adjustments during the 20-minute exposure in order to capture subtle textures and slight tonal differences between the white bear and the polar backdrop. “My life as an artist began the moment I saw that I had succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film,” he notes.

Over the following four decades, Sugimoto made further visits to the American Museum of Natural History as well as to museums elsewhere in the US. In his first scenes, Sugimoto saw echoes of modern life, as in Hyena-Jackal-Vulture (1976), in which “the gloomy feast of the vultures conveys the atmosphere of the New York art scene.” In the later works in this series, he wanted to portray the ancient world as something tangible and real.

Theaters

In 1976, Sugimoto set up his camera in the back of a New York cinema, setting the exposure time to match the length of the film that was about to begin. The resulting photograph compressed the duration of the film into a single, still image of a glowing white screen. “To watch a two-hour movie,” the artist comments, “is simply to look at 172,800 photographic afterimages. I wanted to photograph a movie, with all its appearance of life and motion, in order to stop it again.”

The brilliant white screens at the center of these photographs function as their only light source, illuminating the imposing architecture of American movie palaces built in the early twentieth century. Amid eerily empty theaters, they seem alternately to constitute a glaring void or a luminously radiant presence, as if alluding to a spiritual aspect of the collective ritual of movie-going.

Sugimoto went on to explore this approach within a variety of cinematic and theatrical settings: “Drive-Ins” series (1993) captures the light trails of planes and stars behind outdoor screens during the photographs’ long exposure; “Opera House” series (2014) depicts the historic European theaters that inspired the grandiose decor of their American imitations; most recently, “Abandoned Theaters” series (2015) exposes the unfortunate fate and slow ruin of the classic American movie house.

The artist has chosen lead for the frames of his “Opera House” and “Abandoned Theaters” photographs. As lead reacts with oxygen in the air, a coating of lead oxide forms on its surface. For the artist, this patination process reflects the passage of time pictured in the images themselves.

Shot in the dead of winter, Palace Theater, Gary (2015) was one of the most challenging photoshoots of the “Abandoned Theaters” series. With no electricity and the ceiling partially collapsed, Sugimoto had to bring in his own generator to power the film projector and electric heaters. He screened the children’s classic, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which created a surreal juxtaposition with the deteriorated interior of the cinema. Despite getting approval from the city, the photoshoot ended with Sugimoto and his team being detained by the police for breaking and entering.

Portraits

Many photographers have captured the famous faces of their cultural moment. But in this series, Sugimoto presents royalty, politicians, writers, and artists across a span of 500 years. For this time-traveling undertaking, the artist borrowed wax models from Madame Tussauds in London, using his camera to revivify a cast of famous characters.

The subjects of these pictures are not people, but waxworks—yet, as these images reveal, Tussauds’ figures can look eerily lifelike when photographed with all the trappings of conventional portraiture. Working at night, when the museum was closed, the artist removed his chosen figures from their staged displays, and isolated them against a black backdrop. Studio lighting further heightens their uncanny, lifelike appearance, softening sheeny skin and accentuating elaborate costumes.

While Tussauds’ waxworks are created two percent larger than life, allowing for the slow shrinkage of wax, Sugimoto has enlarged his sitters by around 20 percent, bolstering the impression of portraiture in the grand historical tradition while creating a sense of uncertainty about the nature of exactly who—or what—we are looking at.

Before the arrival of photography, wax portraits were the truest means of capturing a human likeness. Wax artists would either use plaster molds or consult paintings for a likeness of their subject. By photographing Anne Boleyn’s waxwork at Madame Tussauds, Sugimoto adds a link to this chain of representations. His image connects us, however distantly, to its subject five centuries ago. “It’s the layers of different images and realities compressed which make the works successful,” Sugimoto reflects. “It’s as if I’m a sixteenth- century photographer.”

Architecture

Since 1997, Sugimoto has photographed more than 90 modernist buildings around the world. These structures were designed by celebrated twentieth-century architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Luis Barragán.

“I set out to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture,” Sugimoto explains. “Pushing out my old large-format camera’s focal length to twice-infinity—[so that] the view through the lens was an utter blur—I discovered that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus, I began erosion-testing architecture for durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process.”

“The starting point for an architect,” Sugimoto notes, “is to imagine a building’s ideal form.” By deliberately obscuring his subjects, the artist seeks to convey a sense of the original vision of these buildings as they might have appeared in the mind’s eye of their designers.

In a seeming paradox, Sugimoto has also suggested that these shadowy forms conjure “architecture after the end of the world.”

Conceptual Forms

Sugimoto claims that he “never was much good at mathematics.” He explains: “I understand with my eyes and need to verify things visually. I just couldn’t see the beauty in equations.” But in 2002, after seeing and handling the plaster mathematical models in the University of Tokyo’s collection, their surprising forms ignited his interest in mathematical thought.

Made in Germany in the late nineteenth century, these curious objects are physical representations of mathematical concepts, constructed as teaching aids and exported all over the world. In Sugimoto’s eyes, “the beauty of these pure mathematical forms was a wonder to behold, far outshining abstract sculpture.” In the 1930s they had been celebrated by surrealist artists in Paris, including Man Ray, who photographed them. But whereas Man Ray emphasized the objects’ anthropomorphic qualities, Sugimoto aimed to “remodel” them: “I feel like I’m carving this out of conceptual form ... like I’m shaping the forms, using a camera instead of a chisel.” Shot from below, at very close range, the small plaster models appear monumental, their slightly chipped and scuffed edges conveying a sense of their belonging to “old civilizations: Greek, Roman, East Asian, Indian.”

Mathematical Models

In 2005, having photographed twenty-four mathematical objects for his “Conceptual Forms” series, Sugimoto began producing his own mathematical models in aluminum and stainless steel, using computer-controlled precision milling machines. Based on the nineteenth century plaster models of trigonometric functions, one of the first of these, Dini’s Surface (2005), also evoked Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column, sculpted in metal in 1937.

Surface of Revolution with Constant Negative Curvature (2006) was based on a plaster model which looked to him like a “vertically drawn-out Mount Fuji.” Though its peak had broken off, Sugimoto reckoned that with the help of twenty-first century technology he could make a new version, extending the tip to infinity: “I searched out the highest precision metalworking team in Japan and through much trial and error we managed to get the tip down to a mere one-millimeter diameter—any less than that, the material itself wouldn’t hold up.”

Referring to his “Mathematical Models” as “objects”, Sugimoto insists: “I am not a sculptor; I’m a model maker, though when my oil-smeared creations emerged from the multiaxial automated machining lathe I knew the joy a sculptor must feel.”

Opticks

In 1704, Isaac Newton published his seminal work Opticks, in which he presented proof that natural light was not purely white, as was commonly believed at the time, but instead consisted of seven distinct colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

Inspired by Newton’s experiments with prisms, Sugimoto began his own efforts to document light in 2009: “What I wanted to do was capture not a form, but the colors themselves.”

In his Tokyo studio, Sugimoto devised a precise set-up consisting of an old Polaroid camera and an apparatus fitted with a glass prism and a mirror. The small format of the Polaroid camera allowed Sugimoto to create condensed yet vivid compositions of color in its purest form. Looking closely at these photographs, you can discern an almost infinite variety of subtle hues. “The world is filled with countless colors, so why did natural science insist on just seven?” Sugimoto asks. “I seem to get a truer sense of the world from those disregarded intra-colors.”

After almost a decade of experimentation, Sugimoto enlarged his Polaroid images into chromogenic prints. The scale of these images creates a full immersion in color. Using light as his pigment, Sugimoto believes he has “successfully created a new kind of painting.”

Lightning Fields

Sugimoto’s inspiration for “Lightning Fields” series initially came from a technical problem in photography. When pulling out a sheet of film from its holder, occasionally the friction causes static electricity to spark, scarring the film, destroying an image. “I always hated it,” Sugimoto explains, “but at a certain point I decided to love it ... to make it happen intentionally. So I created a stage to make it happen.”

The resulting series looked back to the work of William Fox Talbot (1800-1877), one of the inventors of photography, and his research into static electricity. Sugimoto bought a Van de Graaff 400,000-volt generator, which he used to send a burst of electrical currents across a large sheet of unexposed film resting on top of a grounded metal plate.

The results are dramatic photographs taken without a camera. Some works seem to depict a lightning bolt striking the ground. Other images more closely resemble organic forms as seen under a microscope.

In contrast to his other series that involve long exposures and slowing down time, here Sugimoto captures the instantaneous release of energy—the Big Bang recreated in his studio or, as he describes it, “the darkroom of my own mind.”

Experimenting with different electrical discharge tools, Sugimoto discovered that he could produce shapes that looked like amoeboid organisms. So he set out to recreate the conditions of the ocean from the time that life began. Using rock salt from the Himalayas (today’s mountain range was once the ocean floor), he mixed his own primaeval seawater. Submerging electrically charged film into the water, the artist was amazed to see light particles move across the surface like microorganisms.

Seascapes

‘Can someone today view a scene just as primitive man might have?’ Sugimoto dates his fascination with the sea back to childhood. ‘My first personal memory is a seascape,’ he explains. ‘The sea has changed so much less than the land, so when human beings first gained consciousness, moving from an animal to a human state, the seascape might have made a strong impression on their minds. I can share that vision. I can compare my own memory with the first vision of the world.’

Begun in 1980, Sugimoto’s Seascapes have become a ‘lifetime project’ – and one of his most challenging technically. ‘Each wave has to be sharp and clear.’ In order to create his timeless maritime vistas, Sugimoto elevates his large-format film camera upon a cliff or raised patch of ground, and arranges his viewpoint so that the resulting image is evenly divided between sea and sky. Devoid of any distracting elements (such as birds, boats or distant shores), Sugimoto’s compositions focus exclusively on the interaction of water, air and the light of the Sun or Moon.

With their uniform composition, the Seascapes may appear like abstract paintings. ‘Not depicting the world in photographs, I’d like to think, but rather, projecting my internal seascapes onto the canvas of the world,’ the artist reflects.

Sea of Buddha

Inside Sanjūsangendō, a 12th-century Buddhist temple in Kyoto, a shadow-filled worship hall is crowded with row upon row of nearly identical gilded wooden sculptures. Each of the 1,001 life-sized figures depicts Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. Built for a devout retired emperor during a time of great fear, the temple and its contents embody a prayer for rebirth in the Buddhist afterlife.

Sugimoto aimed to photograph the sculptures as they would have been seen when they were first created. Over a period of ten days in midsummer, he made a series of 49 pictures, photographing each morning at dawn as the sun rose over the eastern mountains. As Sugimoto describes it: “The first brisk rays would angle just low enough under the temple’s deep eaves to permeate the recesses of the hall, causing the gold leaf on the thousand and one statues to shine for a brief instant in the dim interior, solemnly emulating the glory of Paradise.” It was, he felt, “a premonition: this is how death would visit.” Sugimoto sees this vast assembly as a 12th-century version of the conceptual and installation art experiments of the 1970s and 1980s. “Will today’s conceptual art survive another 800 years?” he wonders.

Here, nineteen black-and-white photographs stretch along the horizontal expanse of the Great Hall. This is a reconstruction of the parallel arrangement of the statues in the Sanjūsangendō temple, and the most comprehensive display in the “Sea of Buddha” series. Opposite the “Sea of Buddha” photographs is a series of eighteen “Five Elements” sculptures. The artist’s inspiration came from the gorinto, or five-ring pagoda, which presents the five Buddhist elements of earth, water, fire, wind, and emptiness as a cube, sphere, pyramid, semicircle, and droplet-like shape, respectively. In addition to co-opting these symbolic shapes in his own sculptures made of optical glass, Sugimoto also enshrines a seascape within each work. Sugimoto surmises: “With deity or Buddha both vanished from this day and age, in what can I take refuge? Perhaps the only object of devotion I have left is the origin of my consciousness, the sea.”

Brush Impression, Heart Sutra

In the summer of 2023, Hiroshi Sugimoto returned to New York after a four-year absence due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Arriving back in his studio, he found a large quantity of expired gelatin silver photographic paper. Understanding the beauty of decay in antiques, Sugimoto began to use this expired photo paper for his new creations. He decided to bring calligraphy into the darkroom, using developer as “ink” to write in the dark. Brush Impression, Heart Sutra contains 262 calligraphic characters. This exhibition marks the work’s global debut. Although writing “invisible” text in a photographic darkroom was a new creative experiment for Sugimoto, traces of this breakthrough can be glimpsed in his previous works. In his “Lightning Field” series, for example, the artist sought to break away from conventional darkroom methods based on pictures captured using a lens, choosing instead to apply an electric current directly to the film. It was while making this series that Sugimoto began to notice the similarities between traditional film development and religious rituals—repeated actions in a limited space, in strict accordance with established processes, with the expectation of results. Sugimoto has previously stated that he does not believe in a specific religion, and that his faith lies within art itself. At the same time, as an antique collector, he has always been aware of how culture is accumulated and disseminated in different regions through artifacts. The text of the Buddhist “Heart Sutra” which forms the basis of this work might itself be seen as such an artifact: written in India, translated in China, spread to Japan, and is now appreciated for its spiritual wisdom all over the world.

Taima Temple 01–12

Anti-Gravity Structure

In 1902, the East Pagoda of Taima-dera, one of Japan’s iconic Nara-era wooden structures, was repaired: some of the damaged parts of the building were replaced with new materials. This mosaic of ancient wood supports the pagoda, withstanding the weight of over a thousand years of time. Hiroshi Sugimoto was captivated by this symbol of strength against the force of gravity.

Sugimoto placed these pieces of wood within his home in Tokyo, as if he were in the ruins of an ancient pagoda. According to the photographer, “Gazing at these structural relics every day inspired me to photograph the East Pagoda of Taima-dera.” Sugimoto hoped to take life-size photographs of the various parts of the pagoda in order to reconstruct and reproduce the beauty of the structure and its resistance to gravity. In this exhibition, the Anti-Gravity Structure photographs are displayed together with Taima Temple 01–12, which is created using antique wood. The history embodied by the tangible objects of Taima Temple 01–12 and the history constructed by the Anti-Gravity Structure photographs form an intersection of time and space within the installation.