Auteur: Hiroshi Sugimoto
Date: 29-06-2005 18:28
Time Halted: The Photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto: A Column
I.
IN CAMERA LUCIDA, ROLAND BARTHES' REFLECtion on the relationship between photography and mortality, the author writes:
In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W. H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he is waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the Studium, But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and This has been. I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die. I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already happened. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.1
For Barthes, the catastrophe is unavoidable because time obliterates the punctum, or small space, registered in the photograph. The image is evidence of that which no longer exists, because nothing can survive exactly as it is the moment the photograph is taken. Barthes believes that time's passing is linear, that it is an inescapable force pulling both everything and everyone toward chaos and dissolution. Thus, a photograph is able to momentarily suspend time, but reality eventually subsumes the photograph's space and whatever or whoever occupies it.
This understanding of time's passing is a familiar one. Whether or not we believe that the author (or self) is dead, we know that mortality awaits us all. We may choose to ignore this fact, but it does not forget us. Throughout Camera Lucida, Barthes moves between two poles: This has been and This will be. He believes that each photograph "always contains the imperious sign of [his] future death."2 If we accept this part of the author's argument, the question that logically follows is this: is it possible to redefine the This has been and the This will be of photography, as well as lift them out of linear time into some other understanding of time? And if so, what would the photographs be of?
The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto's recognition of time is very different from Barthes'. For him, time is both non-existent and circular. He understands that the bodies that one sees are temporary havens, way stations that are only briefly occupied. In his series Dioramas (1976) and Wax Museums (1994), we see perfect corpses, bodies that have been vacated. One of the earliest ways Sugimoto collapsed, time was by his highly considered framing of a remote source of light, thus making it rather than what it illuminated the subject of our attention. In his series Theaters (1976), he began photographing the interiors of movie palaces, those highly detailed cavernous structures built during the 1920s and '30s. As with all of his subsequent series, the movie palace interiors depend on carefully preconceived limits. With his eight-by-ten camera set up in the balcony, usually during the afternoon showing when the theater was nearly empty, Sugimoto kept its shutters open for the film's entire screening. The photograph's primary light source is the film's duration.
The residue of the film's self-canceling passage forms a radiant rectangle that is framed on all sides by the theater's fantastic architecture. While his deep affection for geometric compositions is evident in a number of his series, and particularly in the Theaters, Sugimoto doesn't impose a geometric structure upon his subject matter. Rather, he reinforces the geometry of certain situations. Echoing early modernist geometric abstraction, particularly the bracing severities of Kazimir Malevich, Sugimoto's theater compositions consist of a whitish rectangle locked within a blackish rectangle. In most of the theater photographs, a darkened proscenium arch and decorative architectural details enclose a rectangle of dense, milky light. Often, rows of empty seats are visible in the foreground, just below the glowing movie screen. Except for the viewer, the auditorium is unoccupied.
From his precise securing of a glowing screen within a darkened, highly detailed rectangle, to the showing of a large empty hall, everything in the theater photographs underscores that the viewer is alone. In addition, because of the placement of the screen, the viewer feels as if he or she is floating in a large, dimly lit world in which luminosity is remote and inaccessible. The ornate architecture frames the light as well as defines it as an unattainable elsewhere, a beyond. In the distance, a glowing rectangle, an aperture filled with light, is encased in an elegant structure. In registering a beyond that cannot be physically experienced, Sugimoto brings into play that which cannot be seen and remains hidden, possibilities that few photographers have explored with such rigor and delight.
By distancing, framing, and staging the light, Sugimoto challenges Barthes' reading of the photograph as the embodiment of "This has been" and "This will be." In contrast to Barthes, who argued that the photograph made him more acutely aware of the separation of obliterated past and abolishing future, Sugimoto uses the photograph to close the gap between these two distinct states of consciousness. In Sugimoto's photographs, the past hasn't vanished and the future doesn't eradicate. Rather, the viewer is floating in a world of halted time. This doesn't mean that the images are more comforting than those that Barthes wrote about, because they aren't. There is an inescapable chill to these black-and-white photographs, a feeling that this is a nether world without sunlight. Even the light emanating from the movie screen feels cold.
With the theater photographs, the viewer is left to ponder what exactly has been? And what exactly will be? The Studium is a concisely composed image of a movie screen, its rectangle of light illuminating its surroundings just enough for the viewer to distinguish the details of the containing structure. But what is its punctum? Is it that the theater in which the photograph was taken will no longer exist one day? Is it that this light has already vanished? Those views would have required very different kinds of photographs.
For Sugimoto, the elsewhere or beyond is a state of consciousness that transcends the essence of reality, which is time passing. Believing transcendence is impossible, he asks: why do we live in time? And what might we learn from living in time depends on how we understand its passing. What is distinctive about Sugimoto's approach to these universal interrogations is how he envisions time itself. The theater photographs can be read as an analogue for both the interior of a still camera and the womb. The radiant screen is the first wave of light flooding in through the camera's open shutter, a birth canal of sorts. Both being born and being reborn means one enters the world of light. Photographs presume we have already entered the world of light, rather than we have yet to enter it. Thus, in the otherwise empty theater, the viewer is the one perceiving object that the light has yet to reach, the innocent child who has not entered the world. Because we see the light as a remote source, revelation forever eludes us, and the present becomes the beyond. It is hardly reassuring that the light emanating from this beyond is cool and inhuman.
In his first two series, Theaters (1976) and Dioramas (1976), Sugimoto established the groundwork for his investigations into the nature of light and time. The recurring feature of all of his work is that he has never used a camera to document a moment in a living individual's life. Thus, his conceptually based work has nothing to do with Henri Cartier-Bresson's advocacy of the "decisive moment" or with Barthe's "punctum." Rather than registering an unrepeatable moment, he approaches photography as something that is no longer bound by the constraints of time and space that we have assumed are inherent to the camera. In effect, he has freed the camera from its historical limitations, and it can now document a moment that existed before the discovery of photography. While a photograph halts time, Sugimoto photographs time halted, even if it is a moment that occurred many hundreds of centuries ago, before the camera existed.
In his ongoing series Dioramas (1976), we see hyperreal scenes of life during the times of our Earliest Human Relatives (1994), the Neanderthal (1994) and Cro-Magnon (1994). In all three photographs, the figures don't notice our presence. We are bodiless figures hovering just beyond the space of their social interaction. In White Mantled Colobuss (1994), a group of monkeys living in the trees define a self-contained, self-sustaining world that never acknowledges our existence. We are invisible, unthreatening visitors floating in the air, viewing a different species in their environment. We are strangers in this world.
Sugimoto has set the viewer adrift in a world in which all epochs and eras are present. However, he has inverted the modernist impulse to access the past, to inhabit it with personae. He is on the opposite end of the spectrum from James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Ezra Pound, and the desire to recover what Guy Davenport rightly defines as the "archaic." The world Sugimoto has been constructing over the past three decades is not mythological. Penelope is not waiting for us to arrive, and there is no quest to be undertaken.
In contrast to the Theaters, which allude to the camera, the Dioramas evoke the nature of the photograph. Replete with all the necessary details, dioramas are carefully staged, three-dimensional photographs. The scenes are both complete and closed, and nothing can be added to, or subtracted from, them. While the Theaters focus on the perceiving consciousness in those moments just before the individual enters the world of light, the Dioramas define the viewer as a ghost wandering through time, a stranger looking at the history of the world. Whereas, Barthes brackets a photograph's existence between birth and death, Sugimoto posits his as existing in the reality that precedes birth and follows after death.
In the Seascapes (1980), which he started nearly twenty-five years ago, Sugimoto once again establishes a compositional structure that evokes geometric painting, in this case the late paintings of Mark Rothko. Each seascape consists of two tonally different, equally sized rectangles meeting to form the horizon. Made of sunless sky (air) or evenly textured ocean (water), the primordial rectangles are both calm and lifeless. Because there is no sign of the ground (earth), no evidence of the shore, and thus no ground where one might be standing when seeing this view, one feels as if one is floating before a sunless (or moonless) realm of air and water, an austere and abject place. Nothing thrives here.
One of the recurring features of Sugimoto's photographs is the feeling that one is cut off from gravity and from being grounded. The photographs in Seascapes have been taken at various times during the day and at night. Some views are almost totally abstract, two barely different black rectangles, while others show a strong horizon, clear sky, and wind-blown water. There are, however, neither signs of life nor markers to indicate where we are. We are bodiless witnesses to an elemental world that is utterly calm, a primordial place that is silent and nameless.
This is the ocean as our ancestors may have seen it. Or, if we are to go forward in time, it may be the way it will be seen by the survivors of the oncoming but unknown apocalypse, the disaster we have been aiding with increasingly fervent carelessness. Sugimoto's ability to take photographs that are dislocated from time and history distinguishes him from both his contemporaries. He is making neither an abstract photograph, nor a fictional set-up. I would further argue that he has no predecessors. Rather, beginning with his Dioramas, Sugimoto has transformed the documentary tradition into something altogether new.
Sugimoto's transformation of the documentary tradition, its suspension of time, is most evident in his Wax Museums (1994), where he photographs time that has already been halted. Focusing his attention on wax figures in situ, Sugimoto's subjects include the living and the dead, heads of state and individuals about to be executed. Made of wax, the figures have devolved into effigies that exist in a hyperreal world in which time does not pass. They are perfectly preserved corpses existing in a state of suspended animation. They are three-dimensional photographs of what a photograph does, which is transform living material into an image.
Recording history is our way of chronicling time; it is a convention we use to confer purpose on our lives. Taken together, the Dioramas, Seascapes, and Wax Museums embody three different ways we have chronicled time passing. By presenting us with wax effigies (perfectly preserved corpses) from different periods, as if they are all equally important (and perhaps equally unimportant), Sugimoto subverts our understanding of history as a story about destiny and purpose. His breakdown of both hierarchy and chronology suggests time's passing may be purposeless. And yet, his vision isn't of heaven or hell, it is of a cold, silent place that has no name, but which closely resembles reality. In this reality, time is no longer linear and episodic. Instead of unfolding, it accumulates, like the light of a film or displays in a museum of natural history or a wax museum. One is left to wonder if reality is a measureless sarcophagus containing us all, the living, dead, and those not yet born?
With both a sense of awe and foreboding, we look at a world which resembles ours down to the smallest detail, but in which no sign of human life, including our selves (our bodies), is visible. Instead, we see perfectly frozen memories. Both the Dioramas and the Wax Museums might remind us of a storage unit in a cryonics facility. In this facility (or way station), the clients choose the circumstances in which they will wait to be revived. If so, then the desire collectively shared by these disparate individuals is to be brought back to the life they left behind, however bleak it may be. Sugimoto's photographs suggest that that one is fated to become either a faultless corpse or a bodiless ghost. Possessing no memory, the corpse is caught in a frozen moment, while the ghost floats freely through time, unable to inhabit it.
II.
Sugimoto's most recent series Architecture (1997) marks a formal break from his earlier work. He has jettisoned hyperrealism in favor of a distinctly blurred image. The blurring shifts his subjects, which are landmark structures, into a dreamlike stillness. Often we feel as if we are squinting or standing underwater. Is the building being imagined in the mind's eye? Is it being remembered? Or does it exist just beyond the clarifying edge of our perception? By defamiliarizing well-known buildings, some of which we may have an image of in our mind, Sugimoto compels us to consider them with renewed attentiveness.
In terms of subject matter, the buildings in Architecture mark a move away from places of entertainment (theaters, drive-ins) and enlightenment (natural history museums, wax museums) to structures that are largely regarded as either symbols (Gustave Eiffel's Eiffel Tower [1998], Wallace K. Harrison's United Nations Headquarters [1997]) or physical manifestations of Utopian thinking (Otto Wagner's Austrian Post Office Saving Bank [2001], Peter Behren's Aeg Turbine Factory [2000], Antoni Gaudi's Casa Batllo [1998]). Furthermore, while the theaters and drive-ins are largely anonymous public spaces, the landmark buildings are tourist sites, places that have been heavily documented in postcards, photographs, and films. For Sugimoto, the challenge was how to dislodge these landmark sites from our clichéd views of them, as well as to make them new without distorting them beyond recognition.
In contrast to his Theaters, Drive-ins, and Seascapes, which have a recurring format, as well as follow a pre-established trajectory, the images in Architecture are far more various in their viewpoints and angles of sight. In terms of a vantage point, we might be located outside a sarcophagus-like building, alone inside a largely dark, empty room, or floating high in the air so that only the building's identifying tower is visible. By dislocating the buildings from their familiar views and symbolic status, Sugimoto asks: what do they mean to us? If they are embodiments of a higher aspiration, how close have we come to achieving those goals?
In viewing structures where we feel as if we are floating, disembodied presences, we sense that we are looking at something both in our past and in our future. It is either a memory or a dream, both of which are insubstantial, elusive experiences. Understood as things of the past, the buildings become ghostly monuments to our unfulfilled desires for utopia, while seen as things in our future, they become unattained ideals. At the same time, in a number of photographs, particularly of shadowy interiors punctuated by light, Sugimoto has returned to preoccupations that he first addressed in his Theaters.
In order to effect these various changes, Sugimoto had to reevaluate his entire conceptual approach to the camera. If he was going to reconstitute reality, as he had done by photographing wax figures, then he had to do so without resorting to a hyperrealist presentation. Hyperrealism would not have shown us time halted, but would have underscored a building's surfaces, telling details, and materiality. Ultimately it would have betrayed the metaphysical basis of Sugimoto's investigation of light and brought him closer to the documentary tradition of urban photographers such as Andreas Feininger, Edward Weston, and Rudy Burkhardt.
Conceptually speaking, Sugimoto had to arrive at a photograph that is not bound by time. His solution was elegantly simple. He set the focal point of his camera to twice "infinity," and found a particular view that resonated with what we know of his subjects, but that dislodged them from their familiar surroundings and postcard vistas. In doing so, he reconstituted the materiality of his subject into an insubstantial presence, as well as transported the viewer into a dreamlike realm.
In the photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, New York (1997), we see the upper part of the curved and tiered facade, but neither the whole building nor its circumstances. Instead of being a familiar image of a historic building, it has become a large sculptural object. The feeling that we may be looking at a sculpture is also true of other photographs in this series; Luis Barragan's Barragan House (2002), William Van Alen's Chrysler Building (1997), Philippe Starck's Asahi Breweries (1997), and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2000). All of them are closer to being things, rather than places. By dislocating them, Sugimoto tarns them into phantoms.
The fact that we might recognize these sites suggests that landmark buildings, however unique they might appear to us to be, are derived from a handful of basic forms that have been used throughout history. Thus, he photographs the reconstructed Temple of Dendera in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. The suggestion here-and it is made ever so lightly-is that architectural progress may be an illusion, that we are still using the same forms our ancestors did.
By reducing well-known structures, both their exteriors and interiors, to basic forms and interlocking planes of shadow and light, Sugimoto rids his subject of ornamental detail. It is as if the ocean has worn their surfaces smooth. As nascent, unadorned forms, they return us to that moment in time when the building itself wasn't a finished structure, much less a symbol. Instead of being a completely fleshed-out idea, the shadowy forms evoke the possibility that they are still half-formed ideas percolating in the architect's mind.
Architecture, evokes the likelihood that all buildings, no matter how innovative and forward looking they were meant to be, will inevitably fail to live up to their architect's idea of them. For while the architect is able to envision the prospect of achieving a sublime perfection, Sugimoto's interplay of light and shadow brings to mind Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and the idea that everything in this world is just a shadow of its perfect form. Evoking a vision in the architect's mind, the photographs become shadows of shadows. Thus, even before we set out, our dreams of Utopia are doomed to fail because they will always be at least twice removed from perfection.
Because it is not always apparent if the forms we are looking at are buildings or sculptures, we have the feeling that we have entered a world where we no longer know either the meaning or use of things. An atmosphere of complete estrangement prevails. As with the photographs from the Dioramas and Seascapes, there are instances where we aren't even sure where we are standing. Devoid of details, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, becomes a disquieting husk. Like Guiseppe Terragni's Santelia Monument (1998) and Sutemi Horiguchi's Oshima Meteorological Station (2000), it appears to be made of ice. The dark sky in Oshima Meteorological Station evokes a sunless world, a place where it is always night.
The stark silent realm all the structures inhabit is disconcerting for many reasons, not the least of which is the sense that the world is unpopulated, perhaps even abandoned. What repeatedly comes across is a feeling of complete isolation, a world that is even more cold and indifferent than anything described by Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka. The bleakness Sugimoto conveys isn't just metaphorical. What makes these feelings even more unsettling is the utter objectivity of the photographs. In his hands, the camera seems to reveal the essence of reality rather than just its surfaces. An icy, indifferent machine animates time.
Sugimoto's photographs remind us that architecture is a particularly delicate and short-lived art form. This becomes depressingly apparent when one tabulates the number of buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright that have been destroyed in the name of progress. This feeling of vulnerability is more deeply underscored by the events of September 11, 2001, when we learned how quickly and irrevocably a building can be made to collapse. Somber and dark, Sugimoto's photographs of the World Trade Center stir up all sorts of emotions. For one thing, the photographs strike us as prescient, as if on some level the photographer knew that the two towers would cease to exist in our lifetime.
We make intense emotional investments in certain buildings and structures. One cannot separate the Eiffel Tower from Paris, for example, Casa Batllo from Barcelona, or the World Trade Center from New York. We regard these structures as living symbols, as structures so potent in our imagination that we think of them as possessing a life force. And yet the world is in constant flux, and every structure and monument is always approaching its own demise. In Sugimoto's Architecture, we come to the realization that the solid world isn't solid at all, and perhaps it never was.
Another way to look at Architecture is to uncover possible groupings. For in addition to the buildings that look like sculptures, there are also dark interiors punctuated by light, and tall shadowy forms. Made up of skyscrapers, this latter group has been transformed into ghostly structures that seem to be made up solely of shadows. Sentinels watching over a world devoid of human life, they seem to be standing in the place known as the "future," waiting. In this group of photographs, it doesn't matter if we turn towards the past or future, memory or dreams, because we will always be greeted by silence and shadows.
In the three images of R. M. Schindler's house (all 1997), the three of Antoni Gaudí's Casa Batllo (all 1998), Tadao Ando's Church of Light (1997), and other interior views, Sugimoto photographs light entering a darkened room. The difference in these works is that the interiors are no longer finely detailed. Rather, the walls seem to be constructed out of shadows. It is as if the light, walls, and shadows are equally elemental. Registering his own inevitable movement towards dissolution, this change can be read as Sugimoto's own awareness of impending mortality.
At the same time, read as analogues for our existence before birth, both the theaters and the recent interiors transport us to that moment where we have not yet entered the world of light and thus of living. Instead, we exist as disembodied presences, ghosts. In his other series, particularly the Dioramas and Wax Museums, our disembodiment is understood differently. We are invisible presences looking at examples of our collective history. We are wandering around in a realm that can be called the afterlife.
Sugimoto first gained attention when he equated the moment when a camera's shutters have just opened with being born. Three decades later, and with utter objectivity, in a room (or world) where the enclosing structure seems to be dissolving into something akin to shadows, he focuses our attention on the light. And even though the walls seem to have devolved into an elemental presence, the light remains nearby but remote. This time, however, the light is not framed by an elaborate architectural fantasy, but by shadows.
In his photographs, Sugimoto proposes that the desire to attain a state of permanence is what has haunted each of us throughout history, and that our perceiving consciousness possesses an insatiable desire for revelation. In our unavoidable isolation this is what we share. In Sugimoto's photograph of Erik Gunnar Asplund's Woodland Cemetery (2001), we are standing or floating on a path that leads directly to the horizon. There is no one beside us, and there is nothing else we can do but continue on the road that stretches out before us. In this world where time appears to have been suspended, we may not be able to move forward at all. It may be that all we can do is be witnesses to the world that we once inhabited or have yet to enter.
NOTES
1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 96.
2. Ibid, 57.
JOHN YAU recently completed editing a selection of his essays, The Passionate Spectator, for the University of Michigan Press. His next book of poems will be published . by Penguin in 2006. He teaches at Mason Cross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.
Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Sep/Oct 2004
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