Hiroshi Sugimoto
Time Machine
Hayward Gallery, London

In 1974, Hiroshi Sugimoto was standing in front of a large diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in New York when he had a sudden revelation. Conceding that the backdrops looked fake, he noticed that by “taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real.” Two years later he returned, this time with a large-format camera, and with the precision of a Meiji-era photographer produced a single frame of a polar bear standing over a dead seal. Setting his exposure to 20 minutes in order to capture the subtlest textures and tones, Sugimoto emerged with Polar Bear (1976), and in that very moment realized that his career as an artist had begun: “I had succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film.”

“Time Machine,” the Japanese photographer’s half-century retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, was a sweeping, almost mythic, survey of how time operates, not only with regard to the long arc of our planet’s history, but also to the mechanical process and apparatus of the camera. Starting with his Dioramas (1976–94), Sugimoto photographed everything from a California Condor (1994) to a Manatee (1994), a large, aquatic mammal—here resplendent, solitary, drifting in the void, speckled with dappled light breaking through the surface, somehow more real, more present, more alive, even, than any documentary photograph. But the most arresting, the most haunting picture might arguably be Earliest Human Relatives (1994), in which a naked man and woman trudge silently across a barren landscape, while in the far distance a volcano erupts. The couple’s footprints are visible, but whether formed by sand or by the fallen ash it is hard to tell, given the use of monochrome film stock. There can be a terror, an anxiety, in uncertain images, but this one seems to augur a bleak future and a sense of impending dread, with familiar places transformed by the realities of a climate in flux. As the French theorist René Girard once wrote, “I am convinced that history has meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying.”