A Screen Full of Time: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters
Auf Deutsch lesen · YETA Journal
A white cinema screen can hold a surprising amount: an entire film, its duration, and the space in which people watch it. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters change how we think about what a photograph can preserve.
A film becomes light
We usually expect a cinema screen to move. In Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs, we encounter a luminous surface on which no action remains legible. It is the result of an unusual decision: the exposure lasts as long as the film. On his website, Sugimoto describes an early experiment with a large-format camera in a New York cinema. He opened the shutter when the screening began and closed it about two hours later. [1]
Events that unfolded in sequence are brought together. Faces, changes of location, and dramatic turns can no longer be distinguished. The negative gathers light without preserving a readable narrative. That distinction matters: the photograph holds the duration of a screening, but we cannot retrieve the film from it. An exposure may register a great deal while telling us very little about what actually happened.
The room comes forward
In Carpenter Center, Richmond, 1993, the bright screen sits within an elaborately decorated stage opening. Curving ornament, dark side walls, and arcs of seating form a layered frame. The light initially draws the eye to the centre. Since there is no scene to decipher there, the gaze moves back towards the edges: to forms that a visit to the cinema, in darkness, might easily leave unnoticed. [1]
Cinerama Dome, Hollywood, 1993 arranges the act of looking differently. A broad, curved screen dominates the auditorium, beneath a ceiling divided into geometric shapes. Moving between the two photographs reveals that the white surface is more than a repeatable effect. Its proportions alter its relationship with the room. Here the architecture feels like a structure for looking together; there it resembles an elaborately constructed promise. This is a reading of the images, rather than a documented statement of the artist’s intention.
What the photograph cannot prove
The silent rows of seats tempt us to imagine a world without an audience. Yet a long exposure does not straightforwardly tell us who was in the room throughout its making. Visibility also depends on how much light falls on something and how it moves. The apparently empty scene is not a complete account of the circumstances in which it was photographed.
This is precisely where the works become compelling. They depict actual spaces while demonstrating how powerfully a photographic process shapes our understanding of them. The camera becomes an instrument with a timescale of its own. Our eyes can follow a story; this exposure gathers its changing states of light. Both encounter the same event, but neither gives us the whole truth about it.
The choice of film still matters
Sugimoto later took the process into historic theatres in Italy. For the Opera House works, he installed screens and projected films in spaces originally built for other kinds of performance. [2] In abandoned cinemas, he brought carefully chosen films to be screened. For Paramount Theater, Newark, 2015, Fraenkel Gallery records an exposure of 134 minutes during a projection of the 1959 film On the Beach. [3]
The film therefore does not disappear in every sense. Its visible content merges into light; the choice of film can still help shape the photograph’s conceptual setting. A considered caption opens up this dimension without writing it into the image itself. Someone looking only at the bright surface sees a form. Someone who knows how the photograph was made may also read a decision about memory, transience, and the future.
Time for looking
Restraint could therefore be productive in an exhibition of these photographs. First, show a work at a sufficient size, with its dark tonal gradations and edges intact. Then offer its title, place, and year, followed by an account of the process. An explanation can expand an initial encounter rather than replace it from the start.
That distinction deserves attention on a screen, too. Text presented immediately can give away the surprise; a tiny preview can swallow the architecture. Sugimoto’s works invite a way of looking that moves between the visible photograph and its invisible span of time. The screen does not give us a story back. It lets us sense how much a photograph can contain without putting it on display.
Sources and works
[1] Hiroshi Sugimoto — Theaters
[2] Hiroshi Sugimoto — Opera House
[3] Fraenkel Gallery — Hiroshi Sugimoto: Remains to Be Seen