Feature

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Sugimoto’s photography wrestles with the role of the camera.

Hiroshi Sugimoto creates some of the spookiest art I've ever seen, said Robert Taylor in the Contra Costa, Calif., Times. 'œWalking into the show in San Francisco is like visiting some 19th century 'Dr. Sugimoto's Chamber of Curiosities.'' The lights are dim, the walls are painted black, and haunting faces from the past loom from many of his photographs. Henry VIII and his six wives stare out at us, while nearby a Neanderthal family poses for the camera. That such photographs are, in fact, impossible lends them an air of 'œmystery and trickery.' What Sugimoto actually has done is photograph wax figures of the royal retinue at Madame Tussaud's museum in London, and a Neanderthal diorama at New York's Museum of Natural History. Surprisingly, learning the trick doesn't ruin the artwork's dark amusement.

Sugimoto's photographs could easily be taken as postmodern game-playing, said Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle. Actually, though, they're just plain old documentary photographs of surreal artifacts in the real world. 'œThe easy irony of his images would reduce them to punch-line art, did they not also spur us to think about the camera's place in a longer tradition of representation and human self-image.' The Henry VIII photograph, for instance, subtly echoes Hans Holbein's paintings of the actual king. Many other photographs testify to Sugimoto's restless experimentation, from pictures of movie houses to out-of-focus images of the World Trade Center to 1,001 photographs of gilded Buddhas. But his best images have no people or buildings at all. Several photographs of oceans, clearly in debt to abstract painting, often seem little more than a series of tonal gradations, as water gives way to sky and cloud. In these seascapes, 'œSugimoto realized without trickery the idea of the camera seeing through time to past centuries or deep into prehistory.'

Recommended

Xi Jinping tells national security team to prepare for 'worst-case scenario'
Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Chinese Troubles

Xi Jinping tells national security team to prepare for 'worst-case scenario'

Putin blames Kyiv for 'terrorist' drone attack as war comes home to Moscow
Moscow apartment damaged by drone
Hitting close to home

Putin blames Kyiv for 'terrorist' drone attack as war comes home to Moscow

One step closer to net zero?
a solar panel.
Briefing

One step closer to net zero?

Extreme weather events of 2023
An illustration of a tornado and wind-swept palm trees
In depth

Extreme weather events of 2023

Most Popular

Air New Zealand to weigh international passengers as part of safety survey
An Air New Zealand plane takes off from Sydney, Australia.
Step on the Scale

Air New Zealand to weigh international passengers as part of safety survey

Thousands flock to Missouri to see body of nun who died in 2019
People wait in line to see the exhumed body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster.
drawing a crowd

Thousands flock to Missouri to see body of nun who died in 2019

Biden's reelection calculus
President Joe Biden
Briefing

Biden's reelection calculus