'Hiroshi Sugimoto on Photography as a Form of Timekeeping' - Time Sensitive

12 June 2024

While he may technically practice as a photographer, artist, and architect, Hiroshi Sugimoto could also be considered, from a wider-lens perspective, a chronicler of time. With a body of work now spanning nearly five decades, Sugimoto began making pictures in earnest in 1976 with his ongoing “Diorama” series, in which he photographs the displays inside natural history museums, capturing fabricated scenes from prehistoric times to the Neolithic period and in turn making them look all the more real. Shortly after, he also began his “Theaters” series, in which he brings a 4×5 camera into old American movie houses, drive-ins, or abandoned theaters and exposes the camera’s film for the duration of an entire feature-length movie, with the film projector serving as the only light source. In 1980, he started what may be his most widely recognized series, “Seascapes,” composed of Rothko-esque abstractions of the ocean that he has since taken at roughly 250 locations around the world, from the Arctic Ocean to Positano, Italy, to the German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the word time has been included in the title of many of his exhibitions and books, including Time Machine, Stop Time, Time Exposed, and Architecture of Time. As with his subtly profound work, Sugimoto bears tremendous wisdom and is regarded by many as one of the most deeply perceptive minds and practitioners at the intersection of time and art-making. In more recent years, in collaboration with the architect Tomoyuki Sakakida, Sugimoto has also built a flourishing architectural practice, designing everything from a café in Tokyo to the currently-under-construction Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Arguably his most notable architectural effort—and in many respects his artistic magnum opus—is the Enoura Observatory in Odawara, Japan, which features a gallery, a tea house, various outdoor stages and platforms, and gardens.

On the episode, Sugimoto discusses his pictures as fossilizations of time; seascapes as the least spoiled places on Earth; his enduring love for cooking, opera, and Japanese Noh theater; and why, for him, the “target of completion” for a building is 5,000 years from now.

'Hiroshi Sugimoto: Optical Allusion' continues at Lisson Gallery, New York, through 2 August.