Why Hiroshi Sugimoto calls the camera a time machine

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s painstaking photography challenges us by experimenting with the dimensions of time and space.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s diorama with wolves.

One of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s most familiar photographs, which has been shown several times in Australia in collective exhibitions, presents us with the darkened interior of a cinema, lit only by the glow of the screen, itself white and perfectly blank. In fact, as we can see in this retrospective of his life’s work at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, it was a picture he first made in a New York cinema in 1976 and subsequently repeated in several others.

But this is not, as we might imagine, simply a shot of the blank screen between sessions. In fact Sugimoto (born in 1948) had been struck by the idea of taking a single long exposure shot of the whole run of a film. A two-hour movie, as he says, is equivalent to 172,800 frames; when these are projected at a rate of 24 frames per second, lifelike animation is achieved. But what happens when you reduce 172,800 individual shots to a single extended exposure?

Opticks 163.

If you imagine printing one photographic image on top of another – like printing a series of different etchings one on top of the other – the whole surface would be reduced to impenetrable black after only a few dozen impressions. But what happens here is precisely the opposite. In photography the light that is admitted through the camera lens burns a dark impression on the negative; in the subsequent enlarging process, light is only projected through the parts of the negative that are not darkened – thus producing the reverse of the negative on the photographic paper.

So what has happened in Sugimoto’s cinema photograph is that the negative has been relentlessly exposed to light from the screen over the two-hour period, and in the end there is no part of it that has not been completely blackened. When it comes to enlarging the picture, then, no light comes through the solid black rectangle corresponding to the screen and that area of the photographic print is left white. Seemingly miraculously, the compression of two hours of projection into a single shot has resulted in the film vanishing entirely.

The result is very similar to the effect unintentionally achieved in one of the oldest photographs in existence, Louis Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple (1838). The picture was taken from the window of his studio at 8am on a fine spring day and the cobbled street would have been full of traffic; the footpath too would have been crowded with passers-by. And yet the scene appears almost completely deserted. During the exposure time of four or five minutes or possibly even longer, hundreds of horse-drawn carriages passed along the street too fast to be registered on the photographic plate; meanwhile, the cobbled street was gradually imprinted, in the intervals between the passage of the vehicles, and in the end that is all that endures.

Hiroshi Sugimoto U.A.Play House, New York, 1978.

Two human figures, of all the milling throng, remained still long enough to be recorded: a man who stopped to have his boots polished and the bootblack plying his trade on the street corner. Fortuitously, these are probably the first humans to appear in a photograph. The same effect occurs less conspicuously in many later pictures, as when a canal in Venice is reduced to glassy stillness by Alfred Stieglitz (1894), and has been deliberately adopted by more recent photographers including Sugimoto himself in his marine series.

We can see why Sugimoto calls the camera a “time machine”, as the exhibition’s title recalls. But what kind of time machine? Perhaps above all one that recalls the elusive nature of our experience of duration; for as Kant proposed, time and space are dimensions in which the human mind is compelled to experience reality (which the divine mind, as at the climax of Dante’s Paradiso, would know as whole and simultaneous).

According to a philosopher such as Alfred North Whitehead, the very world of nature and of everything that happens is bound to temporality; at an instant there is nothing, according to this view. It is an interesting principle to ponder in relation to photography, which is by definition the recording of an instant (unlike painting, which synthesises duration into a finite image). And as these long exposures demonstrate, if we try to extend the camera’s instantaneous view, things can disappear – or perhaps other things can be revealed. These seem to be the intuitions and questions that lie behind Sugimoto’s work, and which have animated his images over a long career.

It is worth noting too that Sugimoto has mostly worked with a very simple box camera, originally designed more than a century ago, and large-scale 20 x 25 negatives. The pictures are therefore not based on digital manipulation but on lighting, exposure and focal length, as well as subsequent darkroom processes. They are also mostly in black and white. The later colour series, Opticks, inspired by Newton’s theories of colour and beginning in 2009, is based on colour shots taken with a polaroid camera.

His earliest series, and the one that confronts us at the opening of the exhibition, is Dioramas, from the mid-1970s. I use the word “confront” deliberately because the effect is indeed surprisingly and even disturbingly vivid. If we did not know these photographs were based on natural history dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History we could momentarily take them for the most remarkable natural history photography and wonder how the photographer got so close to these creatures in their natural setting.

They are in reality remarkable works of artifice set up at the very beginning of the 20th century and immediately enormously popular with the public. It is easy enough to look up pictures of the dioramas themselves and see how impressive they are, while still being manifestly ­artificial.

How has Sugimoto erased this effect of artifice and made the images seem instead so lifelike? First of all the still photograph makes it harder to see the disconnection between the taxidermised animal and the painted backdrop behind it; black and white also eliminates colours that may be too bright and creates tonal unity. But finally there is the real “time machine” effect: the pictures were taken, presumably in low light, with 20-minute time exposures, and this seems to enhance the effect of unity while also evoking a dreamlike or visionary effect.

A similar process lies behind a series the uninformed could assume to be celebrity portraits but which are actually photographs of wax effigies in Madame Tussaud’s museum in London, an institution that goes back to the time of the French Revolution and has been extraordinarily popular and regularly updated ever since that time. These wax portraits, themselves inspired by the hyper-realistic wax anatomical figures that had been developed earlier in Italy the 18th century, are extremely lifelike and often very good likenesses too, but inevitably also artificial, especially seen under bright lighting in the museum.

Sugimoto obtained permission to remove the effigies from their museum settings and photograph them against a black backdrop, setting up his own lighting as one would for a studio portrait. But once again the most important element in the process seems to be the very long exposure.

Low lighting would mitigate the hard sheen of the wax surface, while the very slow exposure would allow the formal aspects of features and skin textures to register slowly and approximate to something like the organic quality of living flesh.

The final feat of the time machine would thus be to bring the dead back to life, even though these images are mostly of individuals now long departed, and so inherently tinged with melancholy. But none is more melancholy than the striking image of British ballet dancer Darcey Bussell, who is very much alive. In most other fields of art, literature and music, a career ends with life itself; only with dance does a career end in the prime of life.

Among the other series in the exhibition is Sea of Buddha (1995), photographed at a 12th-century Buddhist temple in Kyoto, the Sanjusangen-do. Here a vast hall is filled with 1001 life-size figures of the Bodhisattva known in Sanskrit as Avalokiteshvara, in Chinese as Kuanyin and in Japanese as Kannon. As a quintessentially merciful being, Kannon came to be imagined in a feminine form, but interestingly is still male in this set of sculptures.

Sugimoto took a series of photographs, as we are told, over 10 days in midsummer, capturing the moment at dawn when the sun came over the mountains but was still low enough to penetrate the hall under the temple’s eaves and briefly illuminate the gilded statues. This image of the awakened beings glimmering in the morning light seemed to him like a glimpse of paradise and thus at the same time a premonition of death.

Among the remaining series, there is a remarkable one that looks at first sight like photographs of lightning or electrical phenomena, strangely branching out in ways that recall organic structures, but is in fact produced by chemical means on the photographic paper. There is also a set of photographs of famous buildings and other architectural edifices around the world that are photographed with the focal length set at infinity so the buildings themselves float, out of focus and almost disembodied, like dream images of shadows of memory.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascape: North Atlantic Ocean, Cape Breton Island, 1996.

Particularly evocative is a set of seascapes, which Sugimoto began some four decades ago and to which he continues to add. Here again we return to the long exposures, and to the effect mentioned earlier, of the flattening of the motions of water into a flat surface. Here, combined with the focus set at infinity, the seascape becomes an almost flat vision, bisected in the middle by the horizon, contrasting effects of light and dark in the sky and in luminosity reflected from the surface of the ocean.

Here the manipulation of time makes the already vast and sublime subjects of sky and sea even more eternal, removing all traces of temporal movement and animation in waves but also all sense of the motion and passing of time and seasons conveyed by clouds and weather. It is a suggestive linguistic accident that for the French Impressionists, fascinated by transient natural effects, the same word meant both time and weather. Weather phenomena are indeed among the most tangible markers of temporal change within the steady diurnal cycle.

Sugimoto has banished weather from his time-machine seascapes, leaving only the play of dark and light, abstracted from their literal reference to the cycles of day and night and reduced or perhaps elevated to symbols of being and nothingness. As in the world of Buddhism, everything is at once transient and eternal, ephemeral and transcendent.

For Sugimoto, the seascapes are like a repeated act of meditation in quest of the equilibrium of these fundamental opposites.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine

MCA, Sydney, until October 27