Hiroshi Sugimoto (Part I) April 12, 2006

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Polar Bear, 1976

In person, Hiroshi Sugimoto resists the descriptions that apply to his photography; he is not dour or somber but affable, even irreverent. His February 16 onstage conversation with Hirshhorn Museum chief curator Kerry Brougher saw Brougher playing the straight man to Sugimoto, who cut up on subjects ranging from politics to the '60s culture he embraced as a young photographer in California. On the West Coast, the Japanese-born artist began capturing time on film, a strategy he came to develop in subsequent decades in New York City. (You can listen to that lecture via podcast.)

An elegant retrospective at the Horn of Hirsh—curated by Brougher, in concert with David Eliott of the Mori Art Museum—highlights several distinct subject areas that emerge in Sugimoto's work. These areas of concentration might be better described as "phases" or "periods," to suggest their overarching theme: the passage of time.

Sugimoto kicked off the February discussion with slides of his most recent work—images of fossils, of which he has a growing personal collection. Dioramas created by the artist depicting Cambrian-period trilobites—dating back half a billion years (according to the fossils), or within the last two years (according to the photographs)—roll unimaginably vast epochs into the pinpoint time demarcation of a snapshot. Sugimoto described fossils as “pre-photography time-recording devices.” The images are technical throwbacks, too, with Sugimoto using a large-format camera to produce simulations of 19th-century naturalist photography.

Such photos correspond with the early works of the artist's mature career—images of dioramas snapped in the Natural History Museum in New York. The lecture crowd cooed over slides of these artworks, whose presence in the upstairs show is stately. Assistant curator Kristen Hileman susses out the irony in these pieces: "[I]t is the extreme clarity of the photograph that reveals its artificial origins: a photographer could never get close enough to this dangerous subject in the wild for the amount of time needed to take such a richly detailed shot." Sugimoto himself mentioned "the solidness of the world as a vision" in describing these works, even admitting that his 30-minute exposures allowed him to put on black clothing, enter into the frame to tweak light variables, and yet not appear on film.

There's another tripartite concept behind Sugimoto's portraits. In one series, Sugimoto photographs Henry VIII and his extended, unhappy Tudor family, as depicted in wax by Madame Tussauds' artisans. The wax figures follow the style of paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger. Sugimoto approximates Holbein's lighting conditions when he shoots the wax statues. In so doing, he arrives at a photographic image that corresponds with the source painting. With copies of copies of copies—in paint, wax, and film—Sugimoto emphasizes that, no doubt, all these plastics are unreliable. But more importantly, these little lies can be stacked and situated in such a way to reveal an image that excels beyond its layers.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto, Hirshhorn Museum, Photography, American Art,
  Smithsonian American Art Museum