'Sugimoto': In His Mind's Eye

By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, Feb. 24, 2006

Introducing the artist to a capacity crowd packing the auditorium on the opening day of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's self-titled Hiroshi Sugimoto retrospective, the museum's chief curator Kerry Brougher called Sugimoto a "photographic conceptualist," who pictures the work beforehand and then figures out a way to get it onto film. Later Sugimoto himself compared his work to that of a prehistoric cave painter, whose art consists of projecting an "inner vision" onto a surface.

No one, it seems -- least of all the artist -- is willing to come out and call Sugimoto a photographer. This, at first, might sound a bit strange, considering that what Sugimoto makes are mostly black-and-white photographs, and what he uses is a camera.

After viewing the show, however, which is never less than thought-provoking, and at times frankly breathtaking (another word that was bandied about, with considerable justification, on opening day), such hesitation -- not to mention difficulty -- in pigeonholing is understandable.

Sometimes, in Sugimoto's hands, the camera seems more akin to a time-travel machine than to something used to record the appearance of today's physical world. This is especially true in the artist's series of almost detail-less "Seascape" photographs, 13 of which steal the show in a stunning, dimly lit gallery -- actually, several galleries with the walls knocked out -- that takes advantage of the doughnut-shaped museum's gentle curve. First shown at the Hirshhorn as part of its 1999 "Regarding Beauty" show, Sugimoto's "Seascapes" arose, as the wall text tells us, from a thought that occurred to the artist during one of his frequent "internal question-and-answer sessions": "Can someone today view a scene just as primitive man might have?"

The answer, apparently, is yes.

Choosing water for its timeless immutability -- a quality it does not share with land, Sugimoto writes, which is "forever changing its form" -- the artist has been documenting what he calls "the ancient seas of the world" since 1980: the North Atlantic from Cape Breton Island; the Caribbean from Jamaica; the English Channel from Weston Cliff.

Actually, to say he has been "documenting" them is imprecise. Although he identifies each one by its location, you don't see Sugimoto's seascapes so much as feel them, in the way you feel Frederic Edwin Church's "Niagara," but without the visual detail. To begin with, he doesn't give you much information. Sky. Horizon. Water. That's pretty much it. In the case of his "Aegean Sea, Pilion," you don't really even have much of a horizon. Unlike, say, Richard Misrach, whose photographs of land and sea try to convey a sense of place, what Sugimoto invites you feel in the presence of his oceans primeval is, quite simply, awe.

That's not always his aim. You see, for Sugimoto, the camera is less a time- travel machine than, as he put it in his opening day remarks, a time- recording machine, a phrase he used when speaking of his affection for fossils (some of which will be on view, along with other artifacts from the artist's personal collection, when the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery opens "Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History" on April 1).

Calling a fossil a "pre-photography time-recording device," the artist betrayed his most abiding -- if not his only -- subject: time.

Its most obvious manifestation is in Sugimoto's well-known "Theaters" series, in which the artist photographs, in a single long exposure, an entire movie projected onto a screen. Of course, the film comes out as a blindingly white rectangle, as would be expected when the shutter is left open for an hour or two, while the architecture of the theater itself is rendered in rich detail. People in the audience, when they're visible at all, appear as ghostly puffs of smoke.

Here, one of Sugimoto's other obsessions -- the nature of reality and its representation, in cinema, painting, photography and science -- also comes into play. We see it again in Sugimoto's photos of historical figures from the Madame Tussauds museum in London, and in his series of dioramas shot at natural history museums. If these photographs (of King Henry VIII and his six wives, or of a polar bear, Colobus monkeys and a manatee) appear lifelike, writes the artist, "perhaps you should reconsider what it means to be alive here and now."

A gentle suggestion, and one that perhaps strikes closest to Sugimoto's ultimate target.

Lying deep within all of Sugimoto's art is a kind of spirituality. It's built into the blurred silhouettes of the Chrysler Building and other exemplars of modernist architecture that the artist deliberately shoots out of focus as a way of visual "erosion-testing"; it's hidden among the eye-numbing photographic expanse of 1,001 statues of the Buddha lined up at a Kyoto temple; and it's buried somewhere inside the sculptural 3-D illustrations of mathematical equations -- the abstract, like the divine, made flesh.

For Sugimoto isn't merely interested in what a thing looks like, especially if that thing is a replica of something else. Especially if that thing is an idea inside his own head that he's trying to get out so you can look at it, too. What he's really interested in is the essence of things, whether they're seas, theaters, movies, moviegoers, dead monarchs, wax dummies, buildings, taxidermy animals, the Buddha, statues of the Buddha or shadows. Not to mention photographs of any and all of the above.

Sugimoto's camera is just the tool, but the real lens is the one in his -- and, by extension -- our -- mind's eye. The one that's focused not just on "what it means to be alive here and now," but what it meant to be alive a million years ago, or what it will mean to be alive a million years from now. To encounter the mystery of the ocean, or a photograph, for the first time.

Not just what it looks like, or even what it feels like, but how pictures, like fossils, simultaneously memorize and erase the present, just as lies sometimes tell the truth. And the truth is that, like Sugimoto, I am a camera -- in the sense of a time-recording device -- and so, dear reader, are you.