Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographs are, for me, a meditation.
"This is not simply white light," he says, "it is the result of too much information."
Because I am a videomaker, Sugimoto's photographs of glowing screens in empty cinemas make me feel small. Creating a film or video, no matter the size of the budget, is a labor of love. For someone unfamiliar with the process of filmmaking, it's hard to imagine just how much work it takes to create the final product. Shooting and editing a five minute video can easily burn weeks of your life. And we rarely consider the time and effort required for pre-production, which includes coming up with a captivating idea, summoning the courage to pursue the idea, convincing others to help you make the idea real -- fundraising, organizing crew, equipment, actors, props, etc. Even after investing immeasureable sweat and tears, perhaps the biggest challenge of all is making sure that your completed film or video does not just sit on a shelf somewhere collecting dust, never to be seen again. In a world so saturated with images, I often question why I bother to create more. I think of Sugimoto's photographs.
"...Too much is nothing, which makes sense to me," he says, laughing.
When I read interviews with Sugimoto, it strikes me that he thinks of himself, or at least wants to represent himself, simply as a technician. A sculptor of light.
"As for the sublime, I'm not particularly looking for it," he says. "If that's what people see... I quite like to show it [laughs]."
"The simplest forms have authority - like a blank white light, and how do you photograph that? You need a framework to make it visible. The chances are very small, less than 50%, of getting the very good image first time around."
My fascination with Sugimoto is not just that he is photographing light, but that in a single frame, he is telling a powerful story about the passing of time.
More recently, he has been photographing the sea.
"When I began thinking about the seascapes I was thinking, what would be the most unchanged scene on the surface of the earth?"
Photograph after photograph of undulating waves and reflected light.
"Using the same materials, water and air, I just amaze myself at how I see things differently and new. Time is revealed in the sea. "
