In the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, photography is a type of embalmment, a tactic of preservation, and an instrument of experimentation. Born in 1948, Japanese artist Sugimoto works with photography, site-specific sculpture and architecture. Time Machine at the Museum of Contemporary Art surveys over five decades of his work.
The exhibition highlights Sugimoto’s conceptual approach to images and his continual investigation of the photographic form. Sugimoto’s photographs reveal his reverence for technique. They are primarily in black and white, and often made with an analogue large-format camera.
These are images made with intent; carefully planned, and often slowly executed. Sugimoto’s work engages with the history of photographic materials and processes. His Lightning Fields (2006–) prints are camera-less photographs , images made through the direct use of light or chemicals on light-sensitive paper or film.
These images gesture to William Henry Fox Talbot’s early experiments with static electricity: Sugimoto’s photographs are the outcome of electrical currents meeting unexposed film. The prints feature dramatic forms that look like splayed branches, sprawling veins or plant roots: fireworks on paper. Grandness askew At first glance, many of Sugimoto’s photographs direct attention to the legendary and the monumental: they picture Modernist architecture , portraits of royals and infamous leaders, and wild animals poised to hunt.
But they tilt instead towards less .