Hiroshi Sugimoto
Massively into his stuff at the moment. Have had his book lying around my room for a while now and it’s only recently after picking it up again that I’ve begun to really appreciate his style. On his body of work, Theaters:
I am a habitual self-interlocutor. One evening while taking photographs at the American Museum of Natural History, I had a near-hallucinatory vision. My internal question-and-answer session leading up to this vision went something like this: “Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame?” The answer: “You get a shining screen.” Immediately I began experimenting in order to realize this vision. One afternoon I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture. When the movie finished two hours later, I click the shutter closed. That evening I developed the film, and my vision exploded before my eyes.
Awesome.
Another series I love is Seascapes, which somewhat resemble blocks from a grey scale pallet, where focus is placed on the horizons in which they blend, intertwine and contrast.
Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention—and yet they vouchsafe our very existence. The beginnings of life are shrouded in myth: Let there water and air. Living phenomena spontaneously generated from water and air in the presence of light, though that could just as easily suggest random coincidence as a Deity. Let’s just say that there happened to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right distance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe, we search in vain for another similar example. Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.
