Across a career of more than four decades, Hiroshi Sugimoto has worked in sustained series of black-and-white photographs of exceptional refinement. His subjects, among them theaters, natural history dioramas, wax portraits and the sea, are drawn together by a persistent inquiry into what a photograph can hold of time. In 1980, Sugimoto began his ongoing series of Seascapes, governed by an unwavering law of composition, the horizon set at the center of the frame, sea below and sky above, held in perfect equilibrium. Nothing else is admitted. No shore, no vessel, no figure fixes the image to a place, and no incident fixes it to a moment. What varies is only the elemental register of water, air and light. Behind this austerity lies a question about time. Sugimoto set out to photograph a sight that a viewer today might share with the earliest human beings, and found it in the sea. Each photograph is titled for a particular body of water, yet each returns to the same immemorial horizon. The particularities of geography fall away, leaving a view largely unchanged across human history. The constancy of the horizon becomes a measure against which the faintest changes become visible, and from this single composition the series draws an extraordinary range. Clear skies sharpen the division between water and air; fog dissolves it; darkness reduces both to gradations of black. The Seascapes are as much concerned with photography itself, with exposure, tonality and the behavior of light, as with the sea before the lens. The six works shown here belong to Time Exposed, Sugimoto's 1991 portfolio of fifty Seascapes. Seen together, their repeated horizons slow the eye, allowing subtle differences in atmosphere, light and the surface of the water to emerge. Place survives in the titles and almost nowhere else.
Featured Artworks
Interested in a work from this exhibition?
Contact an Advisor