'Stop Time', an exhibition on the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto considered one the most authoritative interpreters of the contemporary photography scene

Modena - From March, 8 to June, 7, 2015, Fondazione Fotografia Modena will present an exhibition on the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, considered one the most authoritative interpreters of the contemporary photography scene. On display in the Modena Foro Boario venue, the exhibition is curated by Filippo Maggia, Director of the Fondazione Fotografia Modena, and surveys the artist’s career in its entirety, featuring a selection of landmark works.
Since the mid-1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, born 1948) has used photography to investigate how history pervades the present. By photographing subjects that reimagine or replicate moments from the distant past and diverse geographical locations, Sugimoto critiques the medium’s presumed capacity to portray history with accuracy. Sugimoto’s meticulously crafted prints are the result of a rigorous working method that includes extensive preparatory research, the use of a large-format view camera, and traditional black and white techniques. Each of his projects is rooted in a sustained exploration of a singular motif and often carried out over many years.
Hiroshi Sugimoto left his native Japan in 1970 to study art in Los Angeles at a time when Minimalism and Conceptual Art—both of which helped shape his aesthetic vision—reigned. As his work evolved, Sugimoto created subjects of such conceptual depth that he has continued to re-visit them throughout his rich career. Inspired by the systemic aspects of Minimal art, he explores his themes through a rigorous sense of seriality. The Modena exhibition brings together works from the most significant photographic series in Sugimoto's career: from the mysterious horizons depicted by Seascapes (begun in 1980) to the well-known, realized through long exposures, Theaters (begun in 1976), from Dioramas (begun in 1976), shot in natural history museums, to the recent ‘out-of-focus’ works devoted to Modernist architecture.
The exhibition also includes pictures of wax figures from the series Portraits (1999) and works inspired by William Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800－1877) early photographic experiments: Photogenic drawings (2007) and Lightning fields (2009). The former have been produced after photographing some of Talbot’s negatives and are large-scale prints coloured with toning agents during the processing to replicate the often-bright hues of the original sheets, while for the latter Sugimoto suspended the use of a camera, relying on 400,000 volts of electricity produced from a Van der Graaf Generator and creating photographs which resemble lightning or primordial life forms.
According to the curator Filippo Maggia, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s artistic practice is characterised by “the study of the past and the need to depict an era by giving it a body through photography ever since the start of his career. His approach is slow, meditative and rightly prudent, as indeed the fundamental rule in sensing time lies in being fully aware and respectful of it. It now appears clear, as we retrace Sugimoto's artistic career, how his driving force is a ceaseless challenge to the potential that photography offers the artist, as a technique, a language and a tool with which to interpret the world, especially if accompanied by a just as thorough and obsessive practice of other disciplines, such as design and architecture”.
“In the Dioramas series – Maggia comments -, the point of view adopted is a simple one, that of the observer, knowingly external to the scene just as the photographer often is, beyond what is happening. The diorama, a scene set up behind a glass, is a ready-made photograph, of which Sugimoto exalts his desire for truth to the point of making it real, at the same time specifying its historical-scientific value. This search for truth becomes almost fundamentally obsessive in his eternal Seascapes, the pureness of his gaze over an infinite stretch of water which must have appeared identical thousands of years ago to the eyes of ancient civilisations, to this day guardian of so much history in its slow and steady lapping at the shore”.
“Conversely, the images of the Theaters tell of an era this time well defined by a beginning and end (the length of time the film is projected onto the screen coincides with that of the exposure), which ultimately appears as a white rectangle at the centre of the image: a real double take, showing both that which has been the flow of images coming together in the dazzling white of the screen and at the same time what has been made visible by the light - the film theatre - like on a piece of photographic paper dipped in developer”.
In the Portraits, the artist has returned to the wax figures he first explored in his Dioramas series. Unlike his earlier depictions of dioramic displays found in natural history museums and tableaux of famous persons in wax museums, these images are near life-size, black-and-white portraits of historical figures and contemporary personalities. Working in a scale entirely new to his oeuvre, Sugimoto isolated the wax effigies from the staged vignettes in Madame Tussaud's London Waxworks, posed them in three-quarter length view, and lit them against black backdrops so as to create haunting portraits. His painterly renditions are lush with details and recall the works of Hans Holbein, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacques Louis David, from which many of the wax figures were originally drawn.
The Modena exhibition also presents a selection from the Architecture series (1997, in progress), already exhibited by the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa on the occasion of the Venice Architecture Biennale: according to Maggia, “they show how Sugimoto's interest in early architectural modernism shifts progressively from volumes to structures and their relationship with the environment, ever less a background element and ever more an interactive one, thanks to his skilful interpretation of light. The particular shooting system adopted by the Japanese artist makes it possible to obtain an image in which the subject photographed appears undefined, and yet clearly perceptible, close to us, tangible, as if the surface really were within arm's reach. And along with it, its history, its perpetual existence over time, made ever more definitive by the unchanging nature of photography”. The exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto. Stop Time is organized by Fondazione Fotografia Modena and Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena; it is sponsored by UniCredit, which has a long tradition of supporting the arts as well as cultural initiatives held in its area of action. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a large-format catalogue published by Skira, featuring essays by Filippo Maggia, Luca Molinari and Hiroshi Sugimoto.
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Hiroshi Sugimoto (Tokyo, 1948) lives and work between New York and Tokyo. His works of Hiroshi Sugimoto have been displayed in major museums around the world, including solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (2014), the Lille Metropole in Lille (2012), the National Museum of Art di Osaka (2009), Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2008), at the de Young Museum in San Francisco (2007), at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. (2006), the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2005), the Fondation Cartier pour I'art contemporain in Paris (2004), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York (2000), and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York (1995). Sugimoto has won many awards, including the Manichi Art Prize in 1988, the Hasselblad Award in 2001, 21st Praemium Imperiale in 2009, Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon by Japanese Government in 2010, the Officier dans L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (The Order of Arts and Letters) by French Government in 2013.