Hiroshi Sugimoto

Born in 1948 in Tokyo (JP)
Lives and works in New York City, New York (US)

Marion Palace, Ohio

1980
Black and white photograph, gelatin-silver print
41,7 x 54 cm
Year of Purchase: 1990

Since the end of the 1960s, Hiroshi Sugimoto has devoted himself to work on three series of black and white photographs based on an experiment with time. The first series deals with the luxuriant décor of the movie theatres of the 1920s in the United States. In the second series, Sugimoto shifts from the proscenium, the frame, to the stage, from the white screen to slide shows of animals. Since the middle of the 1980s, he has concentrated on images of ocean and sky, with skylines which divide these two abstract entities. For several years, the artist has travelled across the United States and systematically photographed old Italian-style theatres transformed into movie houses, in the same conditions of light and framing. Standing in the middle of the balcony, he sets his camera on a tripod and turns it towards the screen. The roll of film is set based on the running time of the movie being shown on that particular day. Not only is the film literally erased, but the photograph records its passage as a luminous rectangle, a surface akin to memory, at once empty and incredibly laden with data. It is from this rectangle of light that the whole composition of the photograph is based, and that the reading of the interior architecture of the auditorium, which, incidentally, looks desperately empty, is organized. The screen as the one and only light source creates the particular and homogeneous atmosphere of these theatres. The screen usually absorbs light, but here it reverberates and acts as nothing less than an architectural revealer. The radiant whiteness of the screen seems very like the photographic image; it illuminates reality and makes meditation and expectation possible.

^{Béatrice Josse}