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.”

From one dark space of narrative, and history, and time, to another. In 1976, Sugimoto saw something in the cinema screen, specifically in the live projection of film, that once again made him contemplate the nature of time, though in an altogether more conceptual manner. Still in New York, he set up his large-format camera at the back of an empty cinema. But rather than expose the feature film for 20 minutes, he exposed it for the entire two-hour runtime. By doing so he was able to compress time, resulting in a single, glowing white screen. UA Playhouse, New York (1978) was the first iteration in his Theaters (1976–2019) series, and here one notices not only the blinding white light in the center of the frame but also the theater’s ornate interior with its friezes, royal boxes, and Doric columns.

Leaving New York, Sugimoto traveled around the country photographing projections in Cabot Street Cinema, Mass (1978) and, most notably, Union City Drive-In, Union City (1993). In this picture, trees are visible in the foreground, the lights of the city beyond, while in the sky, stars trail their majestic luminescence due to such a long exposure. There seems to be an unbridled romanticism here, a longing for a forgotten time, but in a way this series also engenders another, quite separate, feeling of despair. For it is hard not to think of our current predicament, controlled and dictated as we are now by our phone screens, by the pulsing blue light of those shiny black objects. It was likely not Sugimoto’s intention, but the most gifted artists possess an awareness that resonates beyond the ordinary, beyond the strictures of time and place. His cinema screens appear to beckon and repel, to bring us into their blinding orbit and to trap us there, lost, abandoned, numb. At the Hayward, Sugimoto’s prints were spotlit in a darkened, raised area on the ground floor, and one couldn’t help but empathize with the other viewers drifting from one to the other like specters.

Throughout the mid-2010s Sugimoto went on to document similar spaces for his Abandoned Theaters (2013–15) series, this time focusing on their dilapidated interiors; here were places of lost grandeur, spaces ravaged by time: crumbling ceilings, seats ripped out in a post-Fordist nightmare. For Palace Theater, Gary (2015) Sugimoto and his team brought their own generator to run the old projector. They screened Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), but the police detained them for breaking and entering (though not before he had captured a single, indelible image of the ravages of time).

Upstairs, away from the claustrophobia of screens and primeval scenes of nature, were Sugimoto’s Seascapes, which he began in 1980. In these photographs, time collapses, and man’s insignificance amid the sublime becomes frighteningly evident. Sugimoto has always been enraptured by the sea, by the idea that one is able to view the same scene, or the same landscape, as primitive man. And with the horizon lines cutting through the middle of each frame, many of these pictures appear more like monochromatic abstract paintings, in particular Ligurian Sea, Framura (1993), which is all but pitch black. One had to get up close to notice any detail: the ripple of the water, the faintest curvature of the Earth. 

Elsewhere, Sugimoto’s arguably more minor (though no less arresting) works continued to explore time as a subject. Alongside his experiments with the immediacy of light in Lighting Fields (2009) and the spiritual timelessness of his Sea of Buddha series from 1995 (1,001 wooden sculptures of the Bodhisattva in a 12th-century temple in Kyoto), it was his Portraits (1999) series of waxwork figures from Madame Tussauds in London that most unsettled—their uncanny likeness to real people heightened by Sugimoto’s decision to photograph them in front of black backdrops and under studio lights. This was a rogues’ gallery of the famous and the infamous, as Elizabeth II, Salvador Dali, Diana, Princess of Wales, Fidel Castro, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Oscar Wilde (all 1999) were “exhumed,” evoking the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s reflection of the waxwork figure: “a feeling of horror: it produces the effect of a rigid corpse.” Similarly, his Architecture (1997–2002) series embraced the conceptual as Sugimoto set his focus to infinity so that each iconic structure is blurred to the point of near-disappearance. Most hauntingly, World Trade Center (1997), the iconic towers in New York brought down only four years later, imagines, as Sugimoto once remarked, “architecture after the end of the world.”

Sugimoto’s works give access to something beyond time, leading us to the very edge of the infinite. That is to say, photography is a medium that conflates past and present and gives to our experience simultaneous existence and order. It requires a submission to something outside of oneself, to the summoning of an external force. Being at the Hayward, surrounded by the transcendence and elegy of Sugimoto’s photographs, brought to mind a line from Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (1933), in which he writes of “a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray.”