Looking at the birdie: thoughts about posing for a portrait in Hiroshi Sugimoto's studio

Tracey Bashkoff: Have you ever made photographic portraits?

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Of live people? No--I'm not interested in living people at all. [Laughs]

--Tracey Bashkoff, conversation with Hiroshi Sugimoto, 2000

Hiroshi Sugimoto, the Japanese-born photographer who lives part of the year in New York, needs no introduction to readers of Art in America. The persons in need of introduction are the two authors of this essay, whose portrait Sugimoto took when they visited his studio in March 2003. Briefly, we are retired professors of English literature, who for some 40 years have collected Japanese art. We first met Sugimoto in the early 1980s, when he was supporting himself in New York as a dealer in Japanese art. In those days his photographs cost only a tiny fraction of what they bring today. We admired them enormously, but we were in the market for early Japanese art, not photographs. Still, we couldn't resist, so we bought some and donated them to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A little later we did the same for the Worcester Art Museum, and then for the Harvard University Art Museums, but ultimately we came to our senses and bought some photographs for ourselves. By that time, Sugimoto had achieved fame and no longer ran a gallery, but we continued to see him occasionally (as we still do) in New York at the gallery that represents him (Sonnabend) and also in Japan, which we visit annually in our hunt for Japanese art. Sugimoto himself is an energetic collector of Buddhist and Shinto material, so there is always plenty to talk about--which dealer has what and for how much, that sort of thing.

In the winter of 2002-03 the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited some of our Japanese works in a show titled "The Written Image," and Sugimoto decided that he would write something about this exhibition for a Japanese magazine, Waraku (Japanese Pleasure). He has written several articles for the journal, always illustrated with photographs, and he decided that a picture of the collectors as well as a picture or two of the exhibition would be appropriate, so he asked if we would visit his studio in Chelsea. His only instruction was, "Look like professors." Professors today are likely to appear in class in jeans and a sweatshirt, but we are of the old school; we can hardly imagine appearing in public without jackets and neckties, so that is what we wore on the appointed day. Sugimoto also knew that we have done some writing, so he suggested we each might bring a book. Sylvan opted for a big volume of Shakespeare that he edited, Bill for a paperback of Shakespeare's sonnets that he co-edited with W.H. Auden. In the event, apparently Sugimoto liked the idea of a big book, but he wasn't keen on the small book, so only the Complete Shakespeare made the cut.

Sugimoto is not known for his portraits of living people--so far as we know, he has never exhibited any--but rather for a number of series: dioramas in museums of natural history, theater interiors and empty drive-ins, seascapes, architecture, burning candles, and portraits based on waxworks, among others. He has occasionally said (how earnestly, we are not sure) that he gives life to the lifeless figures in the dioramas and wax museums. For instance, he has explained, the viewer who sees a diorama in a museum is struck by the lifelessness of the thing: there is an evident disparity between the painted background and the three-dimensional figures, and the whole is set behind a frame, and labeled. In Sugimoto's black-and-white photos of dioramas, frame and label are omitted, and the colors of the background and of the figures are unified by being presented in black, white and shades of gray. Similarly, in a wax museum the figures, however lifelike superficially, are in contexts (behind ropes, on platforms or in cases) that make them clearly artificial (except for the cunningly placed figure that represents a dozing guard), and the light on the wax often makes the surface look not like flesh, but like--well, like wax.

So, if Sugimoto's photographs give life to stuffed creatures and to wax figures, what do his photographs do to the living? Do his portraits of living subjects catch rich interior lives perhaps otherwise known only to the sitters? And what do we, the sitters, make of our portrait, with its preternatural detail? First let us say that a friend who saw it told us that Barnet (on the right) looks like an unhappy boy dressed by his mother for the first day of school, and Burto looks like a benevolent gentleman too good to be alive. Another friend says that Barnet must be thinking, "I want to say it, but I won't," and Burto is thinking, "Oh, my God, he is going to say it!" Burto thinks that Barnet seems to believe he is part of Mount Rushmore, and Barnet thinks that Burto is a bit pushy--bookless and ostensibly at the rear but hogging the camera with emanations of white-haired wisdom. Other viewers will see other things--that's what Reception Theory is all about--but we think most will agree this portrait is a sort of footnote to Sugimoto's wax-works series. Like those images, this one has about it some of the contradictory elements that characterize Surrealism, notably life and lifelessness.