This is an outstanding exhibition. For once all the superlatives like ‘landmark’ and ‘definitive’ are true. I massively recommend it.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Born in 1948, Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer, who has also been involved in architecture and set design. He’s famous in the art world for the way that, over the past 50 years, he has created a body of carefully crafted, subtly thought-provoking and quietly subversive photographs. The central point about his photography is that it is not ‘documentary’ in the sense of recording the world as he finds it. Instead Sugimoto’s photography is proactive, creative, staged and invented. It is expressive, expressing ideas and feelings from within, in this respect more like a kind of poetry than what we usually think of as photography.

‘Usually photographers capture something. I use the camera to project my inner idea of reality.’

Staged and carefully conceptualised as his photography is, Sugimoto’s work tends to come in sets or series. He’s had scores of exhibitions but they have tended to focus on specific series. This is the first one to display key works from all the series spanning his entire career. It’s a triumph. It’s dazzling.

Time

I initially thought the exhibition title ‘Time Machine’ was a bit contrived but it turns out to be extremely accurate and apposite. Over the different series, Sugimoto explores history, prehistory, the origin of life, the power of natural forces, compresses 2 hour movies into one image, in hugely inventive ways. They really do amount to an exploration of time, light and space. In his visual universe the ancient ancestors of man come to life while talismanic modern buildings take on the aura of archaeological runs.

He is a majestically playful artist, playing with the technology of camera, our understanding of what a photograph is and what it can depict. The old cliché has it that the camera never lies. No, but it can invent and subvert and tell stories, and Sugimoto must be one of the most beguiling and mind-opening storytellers to ever use a camera.

Sugimoto is quoted as saying:

‘The camera is a time machine capable of representing the sense of time… The camera can capture more than a single moment, it can capture history, geological time, the concept of eternity, the essence of time itself… The more I think about that sense of time, the more I think this is probably one of the key factors  of how humans became humans.’

The Director of the Hayward Gallery, Ralph Rugoff, is quoted as saying:

His photographs ingeniously recalibrate our basic assumptions about the medium, and alter our sense of history, time and existence itself. Amidst all his peers, his work stands apart for its depth and striking originality of thought.

And for once this kind of hyperbole is completely true.

Big and black and white

All Sugimoto’s are big, really big, often four or five feet square. And almost all of them are in beautifully crisp black and white, except for the very last room, which forms a kind of climax to the show and where his images explode into vivid vibrant colour.

This makes them very immersive. That word is often bandied about but here it’s true. Whether it’s a huge photo of an empty movie theatre, or a vast image of the Eiffel Tower or the soothing, calming series of seascapes, the longer you look, the calmer you feel and the more you feel mesmerically drawn into the image and into its teasing, beguiling worldview.

Manatee by Hiroshi Sugimoto (1994) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Diorama

Shortly after arriving in New York in 1974 Sugimoto visited the American Museum of Natural History. Here he discovered an array of Victorian-era dioramas which display stuffed animals in what are effectively stage sets of their natural habitat. he was beguiled by the way the animals looked stuffed, static and fake and yet, if you stepped back and deliberately blurred your focus or took just a quick look, they seemed to come to life.

Thus began the photographic series which he was to call Dioramas. His first piece was a shot of a stuffed polar bear. Using an old large-format camera and black and white film, he set up like a Victorian photographer. He exposed the film for 20 minutes during which he made careful lighting adjustments to capture texture and tonal differences between the stuffed bear and its artificial background. Thus was born an entire approach, an entire aesthetic.

Polar Bear by Hiroshi Sugimoto (1976) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

The Diorama photos draw attention less to the natural world than to its theatrical representation in museums. In Sugimoto’s hands what was intended by its creators to be dramatically realistic becomes eerily false. These are depictions of the unnatural world. He himself is quoted as saying these works being out a subtle fleeting sense of ‘ the fragility of existence’. They certainly give a flavour of its eeriness.

Theatres

In 1976 Sugimoto made another experiment. He set up his big old-fashioned black-and-white camera at the back of a New York movie theatre and here’s the thing – he set the exposure time not to a fraction of a second but to the length of the entire film, some two hours. The 178,000 or so frame required to project a 2-hour long movie are reduced back to one fixed image. All the dramatic action which so much work and imagination has gone into crafting is reduced to a kind of timeless essence, to a single image of radiant whiteness. Two hours of time are compressed down to the the eternity of one photographic image.

UA Playhouse, New York by Hiroshi Sugimoto (1978) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

It’s impossible to convey, you have to see them in the flesh, but in the ten or so variations on the theme on display here the white screen at the centre of the composition glows, eerily, incandescently, ominously. Some kind of optical illusion is going on because I swear the white rectangles glowered and shimmered and seemed to overflowing the frames.

The whiteness is a kind of absence, the absence of the movie you’re used to consuming a frame at a time. But it’s also an image of excess, of the too-muchness of all those multicoloured images which have collapsed into a white glare, too much for the camera to take in, overflowing with artifice.

And, of course, on a more obvious level, the white light from the blank screens illuminates the wonderful interior architecture of these movie palaces, and part of the pleasure of the series is enjoying the different styles and decorations to be found under the one category ‘cinema’.

Drive-ins

Later the idea led to a spin-off, which was applying the same kind of prolonged exposure technique to drive-in movies. Here, while the movie is reduced to a glowing rectangle, the camera records the vapour trails of planes flying overhead and the passage of stars through the night sky. So at least three different types of time are recorded in the same image.

Union City Drive-in, Union City by Hiroshi Sugimoto (1993) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

This in turn gave rise to a series titled ‘Opera House’ (2014) which records the fancy filigree decoration of Europe’s grand opera houses, decorative details which was copied for a long time by cinemas. And then of ‘Abandoned Theatres’ which records the many movie houses which have fallen into neglect and ruin as entertainment goes in home.

Installation view of the ‘Theatres’ series at ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine’ at the Hayward Gallery (photo by the author)

Portraits

In 1999 Sugimoto approached Madame Tussauds, famous home of wax portraits of the famous. The intention was similar to the Diorama series which was to imbue the utterly fake and artificial with an eerie kind of life.

Sugimoto was given permission to work at night, removing the figures from their naturalistic settings and set them against a black backdrop. He then used sophisticated studio lighting to recreate the effect of professional portrait photography, softening the reflections from the waxy skin, and highlighting the realistic fabric of their clothes.

Salvador Dalí by Hiroshi Sugimoto (1999) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

The resulting images are not quite lifelike; they achieve an eerie state of being artificially lifelike, or lifelikely artificial, a peculiar combination of contrive stage setting, poised lighting, realistic figures, gives the whole thing an eerily real unreality. Despite claims to the contrary, the camera always lies and this is a prime example. Sugimoto says: ‘However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.’

For some reason I wrote down the full list of people given this eerie treatment, namely: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, Napoleon, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Salvador Dalí, Darcey Bussell, Oscar Wilde and Princess Diana.

Diana, Princess of Wales by Hiroshi Sugimoto (1999) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Architecture

In 1997 Sugimoto began  another series based on a brilliant insight. As a practicing architect himself Sugimoto knows that every building starts with a germ, an idea, a sketch in the mind of its ideal shape and size. He discovered that if he took images of classic buildings deliberately out of focus then he could, in a kind of magical mystical way, recapture the initial vision behind the finished structure.

He discovered that the optimum effect was achieved by setting the focal length of his old-fashioned box camera to twice infinity which creates maximum blur. And discovered that the best buildings, or at least the biggest and most striking, survive the onslaught of this corrosive, detail-destroying approach.

Engineers have to stress test new buildings. Sugimoto subjected a selection of classic Modernist buildings to a kind of image stress test, visual stress test, conceptual stress test.

World Trade Centre by Hiroshi Sugimoto (1997) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

With my obsessive-compulsive hat on I made a complete list of the buildings given this treatment, namely: the SC Johnson building, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, the Chapel Notre Dame du Haut, the Woodland Chapel, Barragan House, the Seagram Building, the World Trade Centre and the Chrysler Building.

You don’t need very much of a science fiction tendency to also interpret these images as the result of some kind of destruction, some kind of blurring of the pinprick precision we associate with architectural photography. Sugimoto himself suggests that they gesture towards an ‘architecture after the end of the world.’

Thus by only half the way round the exhibition we have covered the huge historical span from the dawn of man (back in the Diorama section) to the post-human age hauntingly suggested by these blurred buildings.

Installation view of the ‘Architecture’ series at ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine’ at the Hayward Gallery (photo by the author)

Lightning Fields

Sugimoto’s inspiration for this series came from a common technical problem in photography. Sometimes when a photographer pulls out a sheet of film from its folder the friction causes a spark of static electricity to flash across the film. This can leave a permanent scar and ruin the image. Sugimoto wondered what would happen if he set out to deliberately create such sparks.

To this end he bought a 400,000 volt van der Graaff generator. Once set up he used this to send bursts of electric charge across unexposed plates of film which was stood on a grounded metal plate. The result is the big and awesome Lightning Fields series, in effect photographs taken without a camera.

Lightning Fields 225 by Hiroshi Sugimoto (2009) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

What do they depict, what do they resemble? It’s a Rorschach test, it can be whatever comes to mind, from a dramatic lightning strike, as the title suggests, or at the opposite end of the spectrum of life and danger, maybe depictions of tiny organisms seen under a microscope; maybe tributaries to huge meandering rivers; maybe X-rays of blood systems in strange animals.

Installation view of the ‘Lightning Fields’ series at ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine’ at the Hayward Gallery (photo by the author)

Seascapes

Sugimoto’s series Seascapes has become particularly well known. These photos depict the horizon where sea and sky meet. There is no land to anchor the image or orientate the viewer, no indication of human existence. Just the three great timeless primeval forces, ocean and sky and – the photographer’s element – light!

Bay of Sagami, Atami by Hiroshi Sugimoto (1997) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Despite their apparent simplicity they have been technically challenging to make. Sugimoto erects his large-format camera on a cliff and arranges the composition so that there is even balance between sea and sky, a balance of the elements, if you like. All extraneous elements are eliminated, such as land, cliff edge, shore or beach, ships or birds. Nothing to interfere with the primeval simplicity of the imagery.

They prompt lots of comparisons such as to abstract paintings, but also to the Zen Buddhist vibe of his homeland. As I mentioned above, I found that if you go up close to them you can make out the fine susurration of the waves, just barely visible in the grey sea. Somehow, being that close and making out such delicate filigree and evanescent objects, was profoundly moving.

Sugimoto is quoted as saying they depict views that ‘are before human beings and after human beings.’ Maybe, but I prefer another quote where he says that the seascapes don’t depict the world in photographs, ‘but rather project my internal seascapes onto the canvas of the world.’ Yes. That feels right.

And the relevance to the time machine is that, if some of the diorama images take us back to the dawn of human consciousness, if the blurred buildings take us into a post-human world, if the movie theatre photos compress hours and hours of time into one single image, then the seascapes escape from time, convey the sense of a realm of timelessness, eternity, an eternity of elemental forces quite indifferent to human measurements and concerns.

Installation view of the ‘Seascapes’ series at ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine’ at the Hayward Gallery (photo by the author)

Sea of Buddha

Towards the end and next to the seascapes is a room devoted to human attempts to convey timelessness, namely statues of the god of detachment, the Buddha. The photo series Sea of Buddha (1995) all depict the interior of a 12th century Buddhist temple in Kyoto.

The temple contains a thousand and one wooden statues of Kanon, the boddhisattva of compassion, seated in an almost identical pose. Having seen them Sugimoto wanted to see if he could recapture their appearance when they were brand new.

To achieve this, over a period of ten days in midsummer, Sugimoto made a series of 49 pictures. He took these each morning at dawn just as the sun rose over the eastern mountains. This first light filtered through under the eaves of the temple, momentarily illuminating the gold leaf on all of the statues, filling the gloomy temple with a golden glow.

The photos thus play with time in two ways: 1) they depict a specific moment of each day, first light, first sun; and, in a broader way 2) are an attempt to travel back in time to the glories of the temple when first built.

Sea of Buddha 049 (Triptych) by Hiroshi Sugimoto (1995) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Sculptures

Alongside the photographs, there’s a room of his sculptures. These turn out to be highly geometric. They came about after Sugimoto was introduced to the collection of plaster mathematical models which are used in maths and science courses at Tokyo University.

These kinds of models were developed as teaching aids in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century and are designed to give concrete tangible form to mathematical concepts. They are an aid to design and engineering students, among others.

Conceptual Forms 0003 Dini’s surface – a surface of constant negative curvature obtained by twisting a pseudosphere by Hiroshi Sugimoto (2004) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

In fact the abstract beauty of these forms had already been spotted by Modernist artists in the 1920s and 30s, by Surrealists like Man Ray who made a series of studies. But whereas they tended to bring out the artefacts’ anthropomorphic qualities Sugimoto was interested in their architectural and monumental feel, which is why his studies are shot a) at close range and b) from below.

Hence a series of black and white studies on display here, alongside just a handful of abstract geometric shapes Sugimoto has himself designed and created.

Installation view of the sculpture room at ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine’ at the Hayward Gallery (photo by the author)

Opticks

The exhibition builds up to a climax with gallery which for the first time displays colour images. This is  Sugimoto’s most recent series, Opticks, dating from 2018. I got chatting to one of the gallery’s visitor assistants who told me that Sugimoto was at an auction when an early edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s classic work on optics was up for sale. Sugimoto bought it and read it and found it full of interesting ideas.

Above all, Newton’s discovery and proof that natural light is not pure white but is made up of the seven constituent colours of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. In 2009 Sugimoto began to investigate the practical consequences of this. After a while he realised that he wanted to dispense with ‘form’ i.e. an actual subject, altogether, and record colour, just colour, solely colour and its effects.

So in his studio he set up a massive prism which could be suspended and moved about to different heights and angles, which he used to project the shades of colour onto clean backgrounds. Then, in a break with his usual practice, instead using a big old-fashioned lens camera, Sugimoto used a Polaroid camera. The visitor assistant told me this was because Polaroid was closing down and gifted him a lot of unsold stock.

Opticks 163 by Hiroshi Sugimoto (2018) © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Sugimoto discovered that the small format of the Polaroid allowed him to create condensed and vivid compositions of colours in their purest form. And not just Sir Isaac’s conical seven. Anyone who’s played with a prism knows there are other colours at the junction of the main ones, in fact blow the spectrum up large enough and you realise it is just that, an entire spectrum of colour.

‘The world is filled with countless colours, so why did natural science insist on just seven? I seem to get a truer sense of the world from those disregarded intracolours.’

After almost a decade of experimentation Sugimoto enlarged his Polaroid photos into huge digital chromogenic prints and it’s nine or so of these big vibrant prints which are on display here. In the flesh they are much more vivid and immediate than my rubbish photo (below) indicates, and they are hung in a room with lovely bright natural daylight. It’s a brilliant and immersive affect which almost has you believing the photographer’s claim that he has invented a new form of painting. Has he?

Installation view of the ‘Opticks’ series at ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine’ at the Hayward Gallery (photo by the author)

Exquisite detail

Hopefully this selection whets your appetite, but it really is worth travelling to London and paying to see the images in the flesh. It’s one thing to see them on a little screen and quite another to experience them at their proper size, four foot or more square and beckoning you into their imaginative worlds.

And the closer up you go, the more exquisite the detail you see. This is particularly true of the seascapes which look a bit boring reproduced in a blog like this. But go right up close to the real thing and you can make out the tiny, barely visible, filigree detail of the waves, the small waves lapping at the distant horizon, taking you with them out to the farthest point of the ocean. There is an exquisite Japanese attention to detail and a calm Zen poetry in all of Sugimoto’s images which reward looking closely, and then more closely still.

The video

Related link

• Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine continues at the Hayward Gallery until 7 January 2024
• Hiroshi Sugimoto’s website

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