Hiroshi Sugimoto

Theaters

Akron Civic, Ohio, 1980

Trylon, New York, 1976

Canton Palace, Ohio, 1980

I'm a habitual self-interlocutor. Around the time I started photographing at the Natural History Museum, one evening I had a near-hallucinatory vision. The question-and- answer session that led up to this vision went something like this: Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, 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, and two hours later when the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behind my eyes.

- Hiroshi Sugimoto

Conceptual Forms

The study of mathematics is thought have begun in ancient India and China. "Zero" and "infinity" were not so much discoveries as human inventions. The notion of length with no width is very curious indeed, the pencil line I draw being only an approximation of an invisible mathematical line. Endeavors in art are also mere approximations, efforts to render visible unseen realms.

Among the notes Marcel Duchamp left in his Green Box are various mathematical notations. The Large Glass attempted to throw projections of the unseen fourth dimension onto our three-dimensional experience, much in the same way that three-dimensional objects cast shadows onto two-dimensional surfaces.

While not wholly subscribing to the post-Renaissance “rational” scientific regard on the natural world, I especially appreciate those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century optical devices and experimental implements that gave visible form to unseen hypotheses. I have photographed suites of "stereometric exemplars" purchased from the West during the Meiji era (1868-1911), now preserved by the University of Tokyo. The mathematical models are sculptural renderings of trigonometric functions; the mechanical models were teaching aids for showing the dynamics of Industrial Revolution-age machinery. Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions.

- Hiroshi Sugimoto

Art:21 - Sugimoto
Sugimoto Hiroshi

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
September 10 - October 31, 2009
Lightning Fields and two new works based on early negatives of William Henry Fox Talbot
Current Exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery in SF