Hiroshi Sugimoto: Opticks

Perhaps his most iconic series, these long exposures of classic movie houses around the world are emblematic of Sugimoto’s time-eluding photography. “One afternoon I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera,” recounts Sugimoto. “As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture. When the movie finished two hours later, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening I developed the film, and my vision exploded behind my eyes.”

For more than four decades, Hiroshi Sugimoto has been photographing seascapes around the world. “A sharp horizon line and a cloudless sky– here began my consciousness.” writes Sugimoto, “From there my thoughts race to the origins of human consciousness itself. The sea reminds me that within my blood remain traces of human evolution over hundreds of thousands of years.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Lightning Fields triangulate Benjamin Franklin and Michael Faraday’s pioneering electricity research with William Fox Talbot’s discovery of calotype photography. In this body of work, Sugimoto seeks to capture and re-create these momentous innovations in the darkroom. 

To create each image, Sugimoto uses a Van De Graaff 400,000-volt generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto film. The result in each case is a unique, instantaneous image of an electrical current, sometimes resembling a meteor shower, or a “treeing effect” on the film.

“People misunderstand that the end is not coming. It has already begun.”

– Hiroshi Sugimoto 

Sugimoto’s Abandoned Theaters continues the artist’s exploration of theaters, which he began documenting in the 1970s. This series captures the state of disuse and disrepair of his longtime subjects. A rumination on time, Sugimoto creates each image using a long exposure based upon the length of the film the artist chooses to screen at the theater. Abandoned Theaters exemplifies Sugimoto’s multilayered practice: the films he chose reflect on the theaters themselves, allowing for a site-responsive form of curation.