Sugimoto’s photographs remind us of the sacredness of images in a time of image over-saturation.
LONDON — The first image at the Hayward Gallery’s show of work by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is a pair of upright apes walking through a volcanic landscape. For just a brief moment, I wondered if the artist had traveled back in time somehow. The figures stand with mouths agape in the savannah, as if taking in the odd reality of earth a few million years ago, and I felt transported back to those early moments of human-like consciousness.
Titled “Earliest Human Relatives,” the photo is one of about a dozen portraying dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History and other museums. Sugimoto used a large format camera to take 20-minute exposures. By capturing textures and tones he makes these frozen statues feel alive. In “Manatee,” a manatee child and its parent swim just beneath the surface of the water, while in “Alaskan Wolves,” I can feel the desolate call of the wilderness for a pack of seven staring out into the snow.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine takes its title from a comment Sugimoto made about cameras. Calling them time machines, he observed that “The camera can capture more than a single moment, it can capture history, geological time, the concept of eternity, the essence of time itself.”
Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Earliest Human Relatives” (1994), gelatin silver print
This time machine quality shows through in a portrait series where he captures the wax models from Madame Tussauds in London as if they are real sitters. With studio lighting and a black backdrop, they come alive like the dioramas, though with more of an uncanny valley feeling. Figures like Princess Diana, Salvador Dali, and Napoleon Bonaparte all stand before us, like our contemporaries. With time compressed, these portraits become a study in the nature of power and celebrity, which television and social media enhance but did not create.
Throughout, the show also cultivates a sense of the camera as machine. Today, it’s very easy to forget this — we simply snap and an image appears that we can share with friends and post online. But Sugimoto enjoys playing with the physicality of cameras. In Lightning Fields, a series of photos that are installed by the stairwell and ascend upward, we see images that look like lightning bolts. The subject is in fact electricity, but not from the sky. Rather, the artist created the conditions of the ocean when life emerged on Earth, placing rock salt from the Himalayas in water and then submerging electrically charged film to generate the haunting images.
The ocean, too, becomes an object of study. The Seascapes series features various bodies of water around the world. Sugimoto carefully composes his shots so that the image is divided neatly in half between sea and sky, uninterrupted by any other objects, like humans or boats or even birds. They appear like abstractions, as in “N. Atlantic Ocean, Cape Breton Island,” which looks more like a steel plate than a depiction of nature. “The sea has changed so much less than the land,” Sugimoto mused in the exhibition text, “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.”
Accompanying the monumental exhibition are a series of online videos, including one in which the artist meditates on life, consciousness, and why we are here. These themes show through in the gorgeous mix of craft, concept, and composition that he assembles with these images. But his work is also a reflection on photography itself: “When photography was believable, my art was possible, but no longer. I lost my identity,” he notes in the video, referencing the rise of digital photography and editing methods.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Napoleon Bonaparte” (1999), gelatin silver print
Indeed, the filmic quality of the works lends the show its meditative quality, because they highlight the very careful, mindful process through which they are made. The Sea of Buddha series presents a range of varied photos of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, in a Buddhist temple in Kyoto. Sugimoto photographed 1,001 life-sized figures at first dawn, catching the gold leaf for a tender moment. It’s easy to imagine him waiting patiently with his camera in this sacred space, only to watch the moment come and go.
Perhaps the most evocative photos are those depicting abandoned theaters with glowing screens in the center. Sugimoto traveled to various cinemas in the US and Europe and set his exposure time to exactly the length of the film. In “Union City Drive-in, Union City,” bright lights of airplanes crisscross the sky above the screen, while in “Teatro dei Rozzi, Siena,” the screen illuminates the box seats and elegant ceiling to create the sense of a palace for film (the theater is primarily designed for live performance).
“To watch a two-hour movie,” the artist observed in the exhibition text, “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.”
Sugimoto’s work reminds us of the sacredness of images in a time of image over-saturation. It wasn’t long ago when the idea of capturing the kind details available in a photograph would have been available only to the most talented artisans.
And yet I found that the show was saying something much more than this. When I think about the through lines of upright apes in the savannah, fields of lightning inspired by the early conditions of life, and the merging of sea and sky, I recognize that the time machines in Sugimoto’s hands are capturing the sacredness of life itself. Somehow, like those first bipedal apes, we are still here, still looking around, still finding a world of wonder despite its horrors.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Conceptual Forms 0006” (2005), gelatin silver print
Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Alaskan Wolves” (1994), gelatin silver print
Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Kenosha Theater, Kenosha” (2015), gelatin silver print
Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Manatee” (1994), gelatin silver print
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine continues at the Hayward Gallery (Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, England), through January 7. The show is curated by Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff with Assistant Curators Thomas Sutton and Gilly Fox, and Curatorial Assistant Suzanna Petot.