On photography, with Sugimoto, Sontag… & Will Yeoman

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On photography, with Sugimoto, Sontag… & Will Yeoman

One of my favourite quotes in Susan Sontag’s On Photography is where she writes about all photographs being memento mori, and that “to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt”.

Born in Tokyo in 1948, ********* photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto is best known for his minimalist, conceptual photography that often explores themes of time, memory and perception. So he would no doubt agree with Sontag.

Camera IconOn Photography, by Susan Sontag. Credit: Stephen Scourfield/The West ***********

Indeed, both Sontag and Sugimoto recognise the lie that we’re somehow preserving at best, embalming at worst, memories by photographing them. The ability to edit images ad nauseam, and the fact that Sugimoto often photographs wax effigies and dioramas, which are already simulacra of living things, only complicates matters.

Anyway, those Australians lucky enough to find themselves in Sydney over the next few months can judge Sugimoto’s art of memory for themselves by visiting Time Machine, the largest survey of his work to be held in the Southern Hemisphere, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==Camera IconHiroshi Sugimoto with VIP guests at his 2018 show in Chateau de Versailles, France.
Credit: Luc Castel/Getty Images

Sugimoto’s work has been exhibited in major museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. He’s also received numerous awards, including the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2001.

His photography, usually in ****** and white and taken with large-format cameras, is characterised by a severe technical precision that belies its sense of mystery and wonder.

Celebrating a half-century of practice, Time Machine includes Sugimoto’s photographic series of seascapes, movie theatre interiors, natural history dioramas, architecture, wax figures and more. But it’s the way he engages with those concepts of time and memory that really interest me.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==Camera IconHiroshi Sugimoto exhibition Opera House at Accademia Carrara Museum in 2023. Credit: Roberto Serra – Iguana Press/Getty Images

Think about his long-exposure techniques, especially in the seascapes and theatres series, and how these techniques challenge your perception of a “moment” in photography. The dioramas and wax figures, which play with history and memory. The blurring of past and present with his often deliberately blurry architecture photographs, like those of the Twin Towers or the Tour Eiffel.

And what about the nostalgia associated with ****** and white photography, or the acknowledgement of ********* aesthetics, especially Ma (negative space)?

I’m reminded in all of this of Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” and William Eggleston’s celebrations of the everyday. And of, albeit at a far less elevated level, my own photographic practice.

Just the other day, for example, I found myself visiting a Wembley food court early in the morning, before anything was open, for purely nostalgic reasons.

It had been at least 20 years since I was last there. But little had changed, or at least it seemed to me. I found myself photographing the tiny merry-go-round, and the confectionery and novelty dispensers. There was something anthropomorphic about the latter especially that was both creepy and comforting at the same time. A trick of memory, no doubt.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==Camera Icon Dispensers, Wembley. Credit: Will Yeoman/The West ***********

fact file

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine.

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

August 2 to October 27, 2024

140 George Street, The Rocks, Sydney

mca.com.au

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#photography #Sugimoto #Sontag.. #Yeoman

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