Hiroshi Sugimoto Lectures about his 30 year Photographic Career

Hiroshi Sugimoto bears witness to the inevitability of change with his photographs. As Susan Sontag states in her book, On Photography,

"all photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt."

In his lecture last Friday – co-sponsored by PhotoAlliance and the de Young Museum – Sugimoto spoke about his 30-year career in photography and shared his perspective on capturing time.

While Sugimoto started the lecture with a video on his work that encapsulated his photographic practice, it was when he stepped up to the podium and shared slides of his work that his acerbic wit and contemplative wonder truly emerged.

His seascapes, introduced with ancient Japanese renderings of the sea that influenced him, are simultaneously a study of a moment and of eternity. Similarly, his Theater series allows us to see in one frame the duration of a movie, folding time back on itself and re-presenting it. In his lecture he revealed a few titles of the movies, which, while hilariously incongruent to the serene photographs, added little to the rigorous concept fueling them. If you’re wondering, yes he did get permission to photograph inside the theaters, but only after a lengthy discussion on copyright infringement. (ha!)


His images of the Natural History Museum’s dioramas, which at first appear tangential to his aesthetic vision, are in fact in sync. They allow us to see a specific instance in our history, yet they float above reality precisely because of their hyper-reality. In looking at the Polar Bear hunting its prey, we can see through all that clarity that the image could never be “real”.


In the Color of Shadows series, Sugimoto further unveils the notion of passage. As shadows cast their mark, Sugimoto is there to capture them with a complex simplicity that reveals the sublime. The Fraenkel Gallery is currently exhibiting this work (up until March 31, 2007) and on July7, 2007 the de Young Museum will open Sugimoto’s retrospective.

While certain of Sugimoto's photographs can appear as the "emperor's new clothes," the images that are successful function to heighten the viewer's awareness of the essence of what surrounds us every day.