On seascapes

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks 008, 2018.

Been thinking a lot about this photograph. It hasn’t left my mind since I saw it in Paris two months ago. It is meditative. In a closed Paris I saw Hiroshi Sugimoto’s new exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, and I spent a long time looking at this beautiful blue work. It was a welcome escape from our lockdown situation.

Sugimoto’s subject matter include lifelike displays in museums of natural history, old American drive-in theaters as well as vast seascapes — as he has investigated time and memory throughout his practice. For him, photography functions as a system for saving memories, it is a time machine.

His exhibition Theory of Colours at Marian Goodman consisted of his new series Opticks. The title of this series is a reference to Sir Isaac Newton’s treatise Opticks, published in 1704. Opticks is according to Sugimoto essentially a series shot using a Polaroid camera, capturing the light that Newton refracted using a prism.

I have also thought a lot about what the photographer has said about his work, that photography is like a found object. That a photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world. But - not every photographer has the expertise in finding these ‘found objects’ as Sugimoto. His photographs reveal the time passing, and the mediums unique ability to render a trace of it.