John Yau

Time Halted: The Photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto A Column

I.

IN CAMERA LUCIDA, ROLAND BARTHES' REFLEC

tion on the relationship between photography and mortality, the author writes:

In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate

Secretary of State W. H. Seward. Alexander Gard ner photographed him in his cell, where he is wait

ing to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the st?dium. But the punc tum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will he and This has been. I observe with hor ror an anterior future of which death is the stake.

By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What

pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die. I shudder, like

Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already happened. Whether or not the

subject is already dead, every photograph is this

catastrophe.1

For Barthes, the catastrophe is unavoidable because time obliterates the punctum, or small space, regis tered in the photograph. The image is evidence of that which no longer exists, because nothing can survive exactly as it is the moment the photograph is taken. Barthes believes that time's passing is lin

ear, that it is an inescapable force pulling both

everything and everyone toward chaos and dissolu tion. Thus, a photograph is able to momentarily sus

pend time, but reality eventually subsumes the photo graph's space and whatever or whoever occupies it.

This understanding of time's passing is a familiar one. Whether or not we believe that the author (or self) is dead, we know that mortality awaits us all.

We may choose to ignore this fact, but it does not

forget us. Throughout Camera Lucida, Barthes moves

between two poles: This has been and This will be. He believes that each photograph "always contains the imperious sign of [his] future death."2 If we ac

cept this part of the author's argument, the ques tion that logically follows is this: is it possible to redefine the This has been and the This will be of

photography, as well as lift them out of linear time into some other understanding of time? And if so,

what would the photographs be of? The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto's recogni

tion of time is very different from Barthes'. For him, time is both non-existent and circular. He under stands that the bodies that one sees are temporary havens, way stations that are only briefly occupied. In his series Dioramas (1976) and Wax Museums

(1994), we see perfect corpses, bodies that have been vacated. One of the earliest ways Sugimoto collapsed time was by his highly considered fram

ing of a remote source of light, thus making it rather than what it illuminated the subject of our attention. In his series Theaters (1976), he began photographing the interiors of movie palaces, those

highly detailed cavernous structures built during the 1920s and '30s. As with all of his subsequent series, the movie palace interiors depend on care

fully preconceived limits. With his eight-by-ten camera set up in the balcony, usually during the afternoon showing when the theater was nearly empty, Sugimoto kept its shutters open for the film's entire screening. The photograph's primary light source is the film's duration. The residue of the film's self-canceling passage

forms a radiant rectangle that is framed on all sides

by the theater's fantastic architecture. While his

U.A. WALKER, NEW YORK (1978)

deep affection for geometric compositions is evident in a number of his series, and particularly in the

Theaters, Sugimoto doesn't impose a geometric structure upon his subject matter. Rather, he re inforces the geometry of certain situations. Echo

ing early modernist geometric abstraction, particu larly the bracing severities of Kazimir Malevich,

Sugimoto's theater compositions consist of a

whitish rectangle locked within a blackish rectangle. In most of the theater photographs, a darkened

proscenium arch and decorative architectural de tails enclose a rectangle of dense, milky light. Often, rows of empty seats are visible in the foreground, just below the glowing movie screen. Except for the viewer, the auditorium is unoccupied.

From his precise securing of a glowing screen within a darkened, highly detailed rectangle, to the

showing of a large empty hall, everything in the theater photographs underscores that the viewer is alone. In addition, because of the placement of the screen, the viewer feels as if he or she is float

ing in a large, dimly lit world in which luminosity is remote and inaccessible. The ornate architecture frames the light as well as defines it as an unattain able elsewhere, a beyond. In the distance, a glowing rectangle, an aperture filled with light, is encased in an elegant structure. In registering a beyond that cannot be physically experienced, Sugimoto brings into play that which cannot be seen and remains

hidden, possibilities that few photographers have

explored with such rigor and delight. By distancing, framing, and staging the light,

Sugimoto challenges Barthes' reading of the photo graph as the embodiment of "This has been" and "This will be." In contrast to Barthes, who argued that the photograph made him more acutely aware of the separation of obliterated past and abolishing future, Sugimoto uses the photograph to close the

gap between these two distinct states of conscious ness. In Sugimoto's photographs, the past hasn't vanished and the future doesn't eradicate. Rather, the viewer is floating in a world of halted time. This doesn't mean that the images are more comforting than those that Barthes wrote about, because they aren't. There is an inescapable chill to these black and-white photographs, a feeling that this is a nether world without sunlight. Even the light ema

nating from the movie screen feels cold. With the theater photographs, the viewer is left

to. ponder what exactly has been? And what exactly will be? The st?dium is a concisely composed im

age of a movie screen, its rectangle of light illumi

nating its surroundings just enough for the viewer to distinguish the details of the containing struc ture. But what is its punctum} Is it that the theater in which the photograph was taken will no longer

exist one day? Is it that this light has already van

ished? Those views would have required very differ ent kinds of photographs.

For Sugimoto, the elsewhere or beyond is a state of consciousness that transcends the essence of

reality, which is time passing. Believing transcen dence is impossible, he asks: why do we live in time? And what might we learn from living in time

depends on how we understand its passing. What is distinctive about Sugimoto's approach to these universal interrogations is how he envisions time itself. The theater photographs can be read as an analogue for both the interior of a still camera

and the womb. The radiant screen is the first wave

of light flooding in through the camera's open shutter, a birth canal of sorts. Both being born and

being reborn means one enters the world of light. Photographs presume we have already entered the world of light, rather than we have yet to enter it.

Thus, in the otherwise empty theater, the viewer is the one perceiving object that the light has yet to reach, the innocent child who has not entered the world. Because we see the light as a remote

source, revelation forever eludes us, and the pres ent becomes the beyond. It is hardly reassuring that the light emanating from this beyond is cool and inhuman.

In his first two series, Theaters (1976) and Dio ramas (1976), Sugimoto established the ground

work for his investigations into the nature of light and time. The recurring feature of all of his work is that he has never used a camera to document a

moment in a living individual's life. Thus, his con

ceptually based work has nothing to do with Henri Cartier-Bresson's advocacy of the "decisive moment" or with Barthe's "punctum." Rather than register ing an unrepeatable moment, he approaches pho tography as something that is no longer bound by the constraints of time and space that we have as

sumed are inherent to the camera. In effect, he has freed the camera from its historical limitations, and it can now document a moment that existed before the discovery of photography. While a photograph halts time, Sugimoto photographs time halted, even if it is a moment that occurred many hundreds of centuries ago, before the camera existed.

In his ongoing series Dioramas (1976), we see

hyperreal scenes of life during the times of our

Earliest Human Relatives (1994), the Neanderthal

(1994) and Cro-Magnon (1994). In all three photo graphs, the figures don't notice our presence. We are bodiless figures hovering just beyond the space of their social interaction. In White Mantled Colobuss

(1994), a group of monkeys living in the trees define a self-contained, self-sustaining world that

Earliest Human Relatives (1994)

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never acknowledges our existence. We are invisible,

unthreatening visitors floating in the air, viewing a different species in their environment. We are

strangers in this world.

Sugimoto has set the viewer adrift in a world in which all epochs and eras are present. However, he has inverted the modernist impulse to access

the past, to inhabit it with person?e. He is on the

opposite end of the spectrum from James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Ezra Pound, and the desire to recover what Guy Davenport rightly defines as the "archaic." The world Sugimoto has been construct

ing over the past three decades is not mythological. Penelope is not waiting for us to arrive, and there is no quest to be undertaken.

In contrast to the Theaters, which allude to the

camera, the Dioramas evoke the nature of the pho tograph. Replete with all the necessary details, dio ramas are carefully staged, three-dimensional

photographs. The scenes are both complete and

closed, and nothing can be added to, or subtracted

from, them. While the Theaters focus on the per

ceiving consciousness in those moments just be fore the individual enters the world of light, the Dioramas define the viewer as a ghost wandering through time, a stranger looking at the history of the world. Whereas, Barthes brackets a photo graph's existence between birth and death, Sugi

moto posits his as existing in the reality that pre cedes birth and follows after death.

In the Seascapes (1980), which he started nearly twenty-five years ago, Sugimoto once again estab lishes a compositional structure that evokes geo

metric painting, in this case the late paintings of Mark Rothko. Each seascape consists of two tonally different, equally sized rectangles meeting to form the horizon. Made of sunless sky (air) or evenly textured ocean (water), the primordial rectangles are both calm and lifeless. Because there is no sign of the ground (earth), no evidence of the shore, and thus no ground where one might be standing when seeing this view, one feels as if one is float

ing before a sunless (or moonless) realm of air and

water, an austere and abject place. Nothing thrives here.

Dead Sea (1996)

One of the recurring features of Sugimoto's photographs is the feeling that one is cut off from

gravity and from being grounded. The photographs in Seascapes have been taken at various times dur

ing the day and at night. Some views are almost

totally abstract, two barely different black rectan

gles, while others show a strong horizon, clear sky, and wind-blown water. There are, however, neither

signs of life nor markers to indicate where we are.

We are bodiless witnesses to an elemental world that is utterly calm, a primordial place that is silent and nameless.

This is the ocean as our ancestors may have seen

it. Or, if we are to go forward in time, it may be the

way it will be seen by the survivors of the oncom

12 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW

ing but unknown apocalypse, the disaster we have been aiding with increasingly fervent carelessness.

Sugimoto's ability to take photographs that are dis located from time and history distinguishes him from both his contemporaries. He is making nei ther an abstract photograph, nor a fictional set-up. I would further argue that he has no predecessors. Rather, beginning with his Dioramas, Sugimoto has transformed the documentary tradition into

something altogether new.

Sugimoto's transformation of the documentary tradition, its suspension of time, is most evident in his Wax Museums (1994), where he photographs time that has already been halted. Focusing his at tention on wax figures in situ, Sugimoto's subjects include the living and the dead, heads of state and individuals about to be executed. Made of wax, the

figures have devolved into effigies that exist in a

hyperreal world in which time does not pass. They are perfectly preserved corpses existing in a state of

suspended animation. They are three-dimensional

The Garrote (1994)

photographs of what a photograph does, which is transform living material into an image.

Recording history is our way of chronicling time; it is a convention we use to confer purpose on our lives. Taken together, the Dioramas, Seascapes, and

Wax Museums embody three different ways we have chronicled time passing. By presenting us with wax effigies (perfectly preserved corpses) from different periods, as if they are all equally important (and perhaps equally unimportant), Sugimoto sub verts our understanding of history as a story about

destiny and purpose. His breakdown of both hier

archy and chronology suggests time's passing may be purposeless. And yet, his vision isn't of heaven or hell, it is of a cold, silent place that has no name, but which closely resembles reality. In this reality, time is no longer linear and episodic. Instead of

unfolding, it accumulates, like the light of a film or displays in a museum of natural history or a wax museum. One is left to wonder if reality is a measure less sarcophagus containing us all, the living, dead, and those not yet born? With both a sense of awe and foreboding, we

look at a world which resembles ours down to the smallest detail, but in which no sign of human life,

including our selves (our bodies), is visible. Instead, we see perfectly frozen memories. Both the Dio ramas and the Wax Museums might remind us of a storage unit in a cryonics facility. In this facility (or way station), the clients choose the circum stances in which they will wait to be revived. If so, then the desire collectively shared by these dis

parate individuals is to be brought back to the life

they left behind, however bleak it may be. Sugi moto's photographs suggest that that one is fated to become either a faultless corpse or a bodiless

ghost. Possessing no memory, the corpse is caught in a frozen moment, while the ghost floats freely through time, unable to inhabit it.

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Sugimoto's most recent series Architecture (1997) marks a formal break from his earlier work. He has jettisoned hyperrealism in favor of a distinctly blurred image. The blurring shifts his subjects, which are landmark structures, into a dreamlike stillness. Often we feel as if we are squinting or

standing underwater. Is the building being imag ined in the mind's eye? Is it being remembered?

Or does it exist just beyond the clarifying edge of our perception? By defamiliarizing well-known

buildings, some of which we may have an image of in our mind, Sugimoto compels us to consider them with renewed attentiveness.

In terms of subject matter, the buildings in Archi tecture mark a move away from places of entertain

ment (theaters, drive-ins) and enlightenment (natu ral history museums, wax museums) to structures that are largely regarded as either symbols (Gustave Eiffel's Eiffel Tower [1998], Wallace K. Harrison's United Nations Headquarters [1997]) or physical manifestations of Utopian thinking (Otto Wagner's Austrian Post Office Saving Bank [2001], Peter Behren's

Aeg Turbine Factory [2000], Antoni Gaud?'s Casa Batllo [1998]). Furthermore, while the theaters and drive-ins are largely anonymous public spaces, the landmark buildings are tourist sites, places that have been heavily documented in postcards, photo graphs, and films. For Sugimoto, the challenge was

how to dislodge these landmark sites from our

clich?d views of them, as well as to make them new without distorting them beyond recognition.

In contrast to his Theaters, Drive-ins, and Sea

scapes, which have a recurring format, as well as follow a pre-established trajectory, the images in Architecture are far more various in their viewpoints and angles of sight. In terms of a vantage point, we might be located outside a sarcophagus-like

World Trade Center (1997)

building, alone inside a largely dark, empty room, or floating high in the air so that only the build

ing's identifying tower is visible. By dislocating the

buildings from their familiar views and symbolic status, Sugimoto asks: what do they mean to us? If they are embodiments of a higher aspiration, how close have we come to achieving those goals?

In viewing structures where we feel as if we are

floating, disembodied presences, we sense that we are looking at something both in our past and in our future. It is either a memory or a dream, both of which are insubstantial, elusive experiences. Understood as things of the past, the buildings be

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come ghostly monuments to our unfulfilled desires for utopia, while seen as things iri our future, they become unattained ideals. At the same time, in a number of photographs, particularly of shadowy interiors punctuated by light, Sugimoto has re turned to preoccupations that he first addressed in his Theaters.

In order to effect these various changes, Sugi moto had to reevaluate his entire conceptual ap proach to the camera. If he was going to reconsti tute reality, as he had done by photographing wax

figures, then he had to do so without resorting to a

hyperrealist presentation. Hyperrealism would not have shown us time halted, but would have under scored a building's surfaces, telling details, and

materiality. Ultimately it would have betrayed the

metaphysical basis of Sugimoto's investigation of

light and brought him closer to the documentary tradition of urban photographers such as Andreas

Feininger, Edward Weston, and Rudy Burkhardt.

Conceptually speaking, Sugimoto had to arrive at a photograph that is not bound by time. His solu tion was elegantly simple. He set the focal point of his camera to twice "infinity," and found a par ticular view that resonated with what we know of his subjects, but that dislodged them from their familiar surroundings and postcard vistas. In doing so, he reconstituted the materiality of his subject into an insubstantial presence, as well as trans

ported the viewer into a dreamlike realm. In the photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright's Gug

genheim Museum, NewYork (1997), we see the upper part of the curved and tiered facade, but neither the whole building nor its circumstances. Instead of being a familiar image of a historic building, it has become a large sculptural object. The feeling that we may be looking at a sculpture is also true of other photographs in this series; Luis Barragan's

Barragan House (2002), William Van Aleris Chrysler Building (1997), Philippe Starck's Asahi Breweries (1997), and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2000). All of them are closer to being things, rather than places. By dislocating them,

Sugimoto turns them into phantoms. The fact that we might recognize these sites sug

gests that landmark buildings, however unique they might appear to us to be, are derived from a handful of basic forms that have been used through out history. Thus, he photographs the reconstructed

Temple of Dendera in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. The suggestion here?and it is made ever so lightly?is that architectural progress may be an illusion, that we are still using the same forms our ancestors did.

By reducing well-known structures, both their exteriors and interiors, to basic forms and interlock

ing planes of shadow and light, Sugimoto rids his

subject of ornamental detail. It is as if the ocean has worn their surfaces smooth. As nascent, un adorned forms, they return us to that moment in time when the building itself wasn't a finished

structure, much less a symbol. Instead of being a

completely fleshed-out idea, the shadowy forms evoke the possibility that they are still half-formed ideas percolating in the architect's mind. Architecture evokes the likelihood that all build

ings, no matter how innovative and forward looking they were meant to be, will inevitably fail to live up to their architect's idea of them. For while the archi tect is able to envision the prospect of achieving a sublime perfection, Sugimoto's interplay of light and shadow brings to mind Plato's Allegory of the

Cave, and the idea that everything in this world is

just a shadow of its perfect form. Evoking a vision in the architect's mind, the photographs become shad ows of shadows. Thus, even before we set out, our

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dreams of utopia are doomed to fail because they will always be at least twice removed from perfection.

Because it is not always apparent if the forms we are looking at are buildings or sculptures, we have the feeling that we have entered a world where we no longer know either the meaning or use of things. An atmosphere of complete estrangement prevails. As with the photographs from the Dioramas and Sea

scapes, there are instances where we aren't even sure where we are standing; Devoid of details, the Guggen heim Museum, New York, becomes a disquieting husk. Like Guiseppe Terragni's Santelia Monument

(1998) and Sutemi Horiguchi's Oshima Meteorologi cal Station (2000), it appears to be-made of ice. The dark sky in Oshima Meteorological Station evokes a sunless world, a place where it is always night.

The stark silent realm all the structures inhabit is disconcerting for many reasons, not the least of

which is the sense that the world is unpopulated, perhaps even abandoned. What repeatedly comes across is a feeling of complete isolation, a world that is even more cold and indifferent than any thing described by Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka. The bleakness Sugimoto conveys isn't just meta

phorical. What makes these feelings even more

unsettling is the utter objectivity of the photo graphs. In his hands, the camera seems to reveal the essence of reality rather than just its surfaces. An icy, indifferent machine animates time.

Sugimoto's photographs remind us that archi tecture is a particularly delicate and short-lived art form. This becomes depressingly apparent when one tabulates the number of buildings by Frank

Lloyd Wright that have been destroyed in the name of progress. This feeling of vulnerability is more

deeply underscored by the events of September 11, 2001, when we learned how quickly and irrevocably a building can be made to collapse. Somber and

dark, Sugimoto's photographs of the World Trade Center stir up all sorts of emotions. For one thing, the photographs strike us as prescient, as if on some level the photographer knew that the two towers would cease to exist in our lifetime. We make intense emotional investments in cer

tain buildings and structures. One cannot separate the Eiffel Tower from Paris, for example, Casa Barilo from Barcelona, or the World Trade Center from New York. We regard these structures as living symbols, as structures so potent in our imagination that we think of them as possessing a life force. And yet the world is in constant flux, and every structure and monument is always approaching its own demise. In Sugimoto's Architecture, we come to the realization that the solid world isn't solid at

all, and perhaps it never was. Another way to look at Architecture is to uncover

possible groupings. For in addition to the buildings that look like sculptures, there are also dark inte riors punctuated by light, and tall shadowy forms. Made up of skyscrapers, this latter group has been transformed into ghostly structures that seem to be made up solely of shadows. Sentinels watching over a world devoid of human life, they seem to be

standing in the place known as the "future," wait

ing. In this group of photographs, it doesn't matter if we turn towards the past or future, memory or

dreams, because we will always be greeted by si lence and shadows.

In the three images of R. M. Schindler's house

(all 1997), the three of Antoni Gaudi's Casa Batllo

(all 1998), Tadao Ando's Church of Light (1997), and other interior views, Sugimoto photographs light entering a darkened room. The difference in these works is that the interiors are no longer finely detailed. Rather, the walls seem to be constructed out of shadows. It is as if the light, walls, and shad ows are equally elemental. Registering his own in evitable movement towards dissolution, this change

can be read as Sugimoto's own awareness of im

pending mortality. At the same time, read as analogues for our ex

istence before birth, both the theaters and the re cent interiors transport us to that moment where we have not y?t entered the world of light and thus of living. Instead, we exist as disembodied pres ences, ghosts. In his other series, particularly the Dioramas and Wax Museums, our disembodiment is understood differently. We are invisible presences

looking at examples of our collective history. We are wandering around in a realm that can be called the afterlife.

Sugimoto first gained attention when he equated the moment when a camera's shutters have just opened with being born. Three decades later, and with utter objectivity, in a room (or world) where the enclosing structure seems to be dissolving into

something akin to shadows, he focuses our atten tion on the light. And even though the walls seem to have devolved into an elemental presence, the

light remains nearby but remote. This time, how ever, the light is not framed by an elaborate architec tural fantasy, but by shadows.

In his photographs, Sugimoto proposes that the desire to attain a state of permanence is what has haunted each of us throughout history, and that our perceiving consciousness possesses an insa tiable desire for revelation. In our unavoidable iso lation this is what we share. In Sugimoto's photo graph of Erik Gunnar Asplund's Woodland Cemetery

(2001), we are standing or floating on a path that leads directly to the horizon. There is no one beside us, and there is nothing else we can do but continue on the road that stretches out before us. In this world where time appears to have been suspended, we may not be able to move forward at all. It may be that all we can do is be witnesses to the world that we once inhabited or have yet to enter. <

Notes 1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard

(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 96. 2. Ibid, 57.

John Yau recently completed editing a selection of his essays, The Passionate Spectator, for the University of

Michigan Press. His next book of poems will be published by Penguin in 2006. He teaches at Mason Gross School

of the Arts, Rutgers University.

photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Sonnabend Gallery.

16 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW