Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine – Review

A central line bisects the work, glowing and transient, like a roman pillar holding up the sky. Branching off it, lines seem to fork and arc out from a central spine, thin spindly spider-trails snake off into infinity. There is something encapsulating about the image; one’s eye cannot help tracing their way along the page, from one side to another, darting back and forth as new details become revealed. Like a pulsating nervous system, Sugimoto appears to have captured the image in a moment of immaculate conception, a split-second instance where the apparent strike lights up the darkness completely. There is beauty found, not just in the work, but in marvelling at the process through which it was photographed.

With all that in mind, it is ironic that Lightning Fields 225 by legendary Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is not a photo of lightning. Indeed, it is not a photograph at all. But more on that later.

Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent his illustrious 50-year career as an artist and photographer pushing the bounds of reality. His work time and time again prods the nature of time, meaning, and reality within contemporary society. In the artistry of Sugimoto nothing is ever as it seems. He is one of the great tricksters of the photographic world, constantly warping the perceptions of the audience to play with their understanding of space and time. Sugimoto’s artistry is one of respect and reverence for the craft that he works within. Each individual piece is part of a greater series, a developmental step in a process that is much about the journey as the destination. Key themes of time, identity, and truth emerge and re-emerge throughout his works, creating cosmic threads that string his works together.

All of this is on display in Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine. The largest ever survey of Sugimoto’s work, this exhibition showcases over 100 works across 5 decades of practice in the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Contained with the exhibition is a stunningly diverse and intricately detailed mix of his most iconic pieces. Seascapes, theatres, architecture and waxworks all co-mingle in a veritable explosion of Sugimoto’s talent and style.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is a much-needed revelation for a gallery that has had some turbulent moments in the post-COVID years. The works are vibrant and full of life, with a brilliant interplay between series that beautifully elevates Sugimoto’s work. Details abound in each room, and it is easy to spend hours being pulled in by one piece after another. The curation is well-structured and cohesive, balancing his many years of practice masterfully whilst leaving room for each work to breathe on its own. It is a tour de force of an exhibition, and not one to be missed.

To give you a bit of a taste of the exhibition, we have highlighted some key works from Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine for your enjoyment.

Lightning Fields 225 (2009)

At his heart, Sugimoto functions more like a scientist than a photographer. He meticulously captures work again and again, documenting, analysing and recreating pieces repeatedly. Each work becomes a part of a greater experiment, a cog in Sugimoto’s conceptual machine. Consider the aforementioned Lightning Fields 225. The work looks to confront the audience’s perceptions of time and reality through the role of the photograph.

In the present day and age, it takes less than a second to capture an image. Improvements in chemical processes, the development of digital cameras and the advent of the iPhone have rendered image-making as the easiest and most accessible form of memory-making ever. The photo as an object holds within it a single moment of time, a slice of reality, kept perfectly still. However, this instantaneous ability has the power to showcase the world in different ways. Before the digital camera, it would have been almost impossible to see a complete lightning strike, it would certainly be impossible to examine it in the detail that we can on an image. A photograph of a lightning strike holds within it a single moment of reality that can never be captured again. It is this liminal space that fascinates Sugimoto. Playing with the role of the photograph, Sugimoto looks to artificially create this instant of time.

Sugimoto created his Lightning Fields series by applying a 400-000-volt charge from a Vann Der Graff generator directly onto camera film. The result were electric charges which were directly burnt into the negative. In doing so, Sugimoto condenses time, space and technique, creating the image of a lightning strike that wasn’t there. He creates art that fools audiences, presenting a ‘false photo’ and creating an image of a moment that didn’t exist. His work, putting in hours of manual, laborious effort, to create a product that looks like it was made instantly. In Lightning Fields, Sugimoto condenses histories and times and realities into a single subversive moment.

UA Playhouse, New York (1978)

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time Sugimoto played with the flattening effects of time. One of his most iconic series, Theatres, explored the idea of condensing reality, compressing whole swathes of time into a single image. In Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine this can be seen in UA Playhouse, New York (1978). In the image, a darkened theatre is lit by a glowing iridescent screen. Light explodes over the old stage, catching grand furnishings and intricate carvings. The photo is taken from the back of the theatre, presenting an empty auditorium, lit by the ghostly afterglow of a faded image. However, contained within the work is an entire film, hours of story captured and recorded in a single image.

Throughout his Theatres series, Sugimoto would go to cinemas and take a single extended exposure of an entire film. The pure white of the cinema screen is the result of too much content, light overexposing the camera and blinding the audience. The ghostly effects of the glowing light create ethereal, surreal images, the fingerprints of a film pressed too hard onto the page. The works hold within them a ghostly past, entire stories taken out of time, haunting the dilapidated buildings where grand stories once occurred.

Diana, Princess of Wales (1999)

At the same time, Sugimoto often plays with the reality that he is capturing. It may be a reasonable question to ask why his work Diana, Princess of Wales has received such prominent advertising surrounding the exhibition in Sydney when, at first glance, it appears so similar to a standard portrait of a famous figure. With MONA’s headline exhibition NAMEDROPPING opening in Tasmania a few months ago, one may reasonably question if it is nothing more than a tactic to generate public intrigue through a famous face.

However, if you take a closer look at the image you will notice a certain eerie quality to the work. Her skin looks too smooth, her eyes are strangely reflective, her face appears almost taught, as if pulled by a wire. Perhaps most interestingly, Sugimoto took this image in 1999, two years after his subjects’ death.

In reality, Diana, Princess of Wales is the portrait of a waxwork, made by Madam Tussaud’s two years after the princess’ death in 1997. In capturing such a work, Sugimoto looks to investigate the disjunct between celebrities and their image. Even though Diana is not the subject of the work, the image is still an iconic symbol of her status. The posture, outfit, and smile all accentuate the public persona of Diana. To Sugimoto this is the truest form of Diana as celebrity, a caricatured symbol of her best traits, a reflection of her relationship to the rest of the world. It does not matter that Diana Spencer the woman is dead, Diana Princess of Wales lives on in memory, in wax, and, most importantly, in photo.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine closes 27 October. Find out more.