Portraits of light

Japanese-born photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent most of his adult life in the U.S., and his major series are widely familiar here. His first museum retrospective, "Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time," opened at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in September and travels this month to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., its only U.S. stop. As one would expect, the survey includes the "Dioramas" and "Theaters" that inaugurated his career 30 years ago, along with an extensive representation of his best known series, the "Seascapes." But if he is most identified with those series, produced over long spans of time, the show comes with surprises: there are many other photographs of more recent and briefer periods, plus such unexpected works as his first series in color, his first sculptures, a Noh theater stage, a model for a Shinto shrine he designed, and his sole video. Many of the later works are more specifically Japanese in subject or form than the famous early works.

Yet the yield of three decades is marked by its consistency of tone, as if Sngimoto had been born fully formed as an artist, knowing just what was important to him. That stands in contrast to an account of his life that he wrote for the exhibition catalogue. A native of Tokyo, he was born in 1948 into a family of merchants. His education beyond the elementary level was in Christian schools. Although he had some interest in art and some experience with photography as a youth, he graduated from college as an economics major. After post-college travel across Asia and Europe he ended up in California, taking classes at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Later, in New York City, he supported himself importing and selling Japanese antiquities, a business that required considerable knowledge and connoisseurship and accounts for his own collection of Buddhist and Shinto artifacts. Some of those are stiff on view at the Japan Society in New York, together with selected photographic works, in a show [see sidebar] that will also travel to Washington.

Sugimoto began both his Theaters and his Dioramas series in 1975 (the former continued to be made until 2001, the latter until 1999). The movie palace as a photographic subject is not unknown, but his distinctive innovation was to shoot the interiors by leaving the shutter of his large-format camera open for the duration of a film, thus capturing the projected light reflected off the screen, along with its gentle illumination of the structural features of the space. How he created the work is crucial to explaining why it looks the way it does. The radiant screen reads both as a presence and absence. The narrative of the film vanishes, and the light becomes substance while the extended duration is compacted at last by the click of the shutter (the photo is not a slice of time extracted from the movie, but the whole of it). The empty screen's glow reaches toward viewers, full without telling us what it is full of. This is a remarkably effective example of the Asian concept of the positive void, fertile with possibility, and many of the images are heart-stoppingly beautiful as the light caresses the ornate architectural surfaces. This elegant effect is missing in the later works of the series, where the explosive outdoor glow of drive-in movie screens looks almost supernatural.

The most striking of the Dioramas are photographs of prehistoric humans. I remember, when I saw them for the first time, an instant of bafflement, of thinking that they were photos of real people somewhere and then realizing they couldn't be. While the series title gives a clue, Sugimoto was able to conceal the frame-and-glass evidence that would have made his source obvious.

His animal Dioramas do not feature famously extinct creatures such as dinosaurs but rather eagles, tigers, manatees and other creatures that still exist in some form. So, even more, one considers the possibility that these are documentary photographs. Yet all strike the viewer as odd because they are so still, so close and so sharp, as co-curator Kerry Brougher points out in his catalogue essay. These differences from contemporary nature photography encourage the viewer to attend to the diorama-makers' art. In his affable and illuminating commentary for the wall labels introducing each section of the exhibition, Sugimoto (who also designed the installation) recalls visiting the Museum of Natural History after he moved to New York in 1974 and being struck by the fakeness of the dioramas until he closed one eye. Then, without perspective--with, he says, the camera's view--they were far more convincing. Artifice vs. reality is a concern Sugimoto shares with many other artists making straightforward photos of contrived scenes (say, Thomas Demand, James Casebere, Teun Hocks), but perception itself rather than creation of the "reality" is his interest.

For his Seascapes (1980-2002), Sugimoto traveled the world looking for elevated vantage points from which to photograph uninterrupted sea and sky. He eliminated from his vistas not only any landmasses that might identify the sites for peripatetic viewers, but also ships, planes, buoys--anything that could situate the scenes in modern time. He regards these seas and skies, he says in a label and in the exhibition catalogue, as the same ones our primordial ancestors saw: these views are a way that we can share their experience directly, across time.