Theaters
Hiroshi Sugimoto
USA, Europe 1976–ongoing
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters project began in 1976 when he had the idea to capture a whole film in a single photographic image. Using a large-format camera and only the light from the running projector, Sugimoto has continued this endeavor for the past forty years, condensing the duration of the film into a glowing screen set against the, often palatial, architectural structures of theaters around the world. These theaters, many of them now abandoned, express the history of cinema as a collective physical experience, just as Sugimoto’s long exposure photographs draw out the material traces of the past in the present. The magical glow of the movie theater screen seems to capture cinema’s hypnotic and dreamlike allure that the Surrealists spoke so passionately about during the 1920s and ‘30s.
Temporality exists on several levels in these photographs. Opting for a slow approach to artistic creation, Sugimoto subverts the contemporary trend of speed and instantaneity, whist also drawing attention to the ‘death of cinema’ discourse that dominates discussions of digital media and convergence culture. (Kim Knowles)
“I was thinking a great deal about the invention of photography. A photograph fixes dead reality in the form of an afterimage. But when you are shown a series of those same afterimages, dead reality seems to come back to life — that is what a movie is … To watch a two-hour movie is simply to look at 172,800 photographic afterimages. Through sheer excess, the dead afterimages seem to come alive again. Since ancient Egyptian times — no, since the birth of civilization itself — the human race has been fascinated by the idea of resurrection. I wanted to photograph a movie, with all its appearance of life and motion, in order to stop it again. What I felt was a sense of vocation: I must use photography as a means to shut away the ghosts resurrected by the excess of photographic afterimages.”
“My dream was to capture 170,000 photographs on a single frame of film. The image I had inside my brain was of a gleaming white screen inside a dark movie theater. The light created by an excess of 170,000 exposures would be the embodiment or manifestation of something awe-inspiring and divine” (Hiroshi Sugimoto: https://hyperallergic.com/323313/hiroshi-sugimotos-otherworldly-photographs-of-movie-theaters/).
Hiroshi Sugimoto, born 1948 in Tokyo, lives and works in Tokyo and New York.