Master photographer, antiquarian scientist, disciple of mathematics, self-confessed unlicensed architect, and a maestro of fakery; the septuagenarian polymath Hiroshi Sugimoto is in Sydney for the opening of his biggest ever survey. The Museum of Contemporary Art is the midway point for his appropriately titled show Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, which debuted at London’s Hayward gallery last year and is scheduled to end at Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in 2025.
For the Tokyo-born, New York-based artist, the camera is the ultimate time machine; a tool with endless potential for subversion and ambiguity.
“All my ideas come from my inner mind, from my brain,” he says. “A photographer usually hunts around and finds something to shoot, but I hunt around in my mind and find something to shoot – that’s the uniqueness of my photography.”
A painstaking dedication to the technical art of photography, and a Zen-like patience and willingness to endure, has characterised much of Sugimoto’s art making over the last five decades; some of it has been created through sheer bloody-mindedness.
He petitioned the Japanese government and the custodians of Kyoto’s Sanjūsangen-dō temple for almost eight years before he was allowed to enter the 12th-century complex, which houses 1,001 statues of Kannon, the thousand-armed goddess of compassion, just before daylight broke each day. Sugimoto removed all signs of modernity in the building – fluorescent lighting, exit signs – and captured the moment when the midsummer sun first peeked over the mountains and shone into the temple.
His highly precise work is in high demand: after being flown in a private jet to the French Riviera, he refused a request from U2’s Bono to photograph the Mediterranean Sea viewed from his estate as part of his ongoing Seascapes series – because the rock star asked him to.
“It was a beautiful sea, but I said [to Bono], ‘it’s so unfortunate. If you hadn’t asked me to do so, I might have done … but I am not a commercial photographer,’” he says.
Despite this, the two men became close friends. U2’s 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon, featured a Sugimoto photo of the Baltic Sea. The artist gave strict orders that nothing was to cover any part of the image; the album was released with no text indicating the artist or even the album’s name. (A reciprocal agreement allows Sugimoto to use the album’s titular song as he sees fit when exhibiting his Seascapes series.)
The MCA exhibition is laid out more or less chronologically, opening with Sugimoto’s 1976 Diorama series. It was a visit to New York’s American Museum of Natural History that inspired Sugimoto, then 28 and working as an antiquities dealer, to “make the fake real”, by photographing the museum’s famous animal tableaux in ways that made the long-dead occupants in their synthetic environments seemingly come back to life.
His technical mastery is evident in one of his most recognisable images, Polar Bear. Taken with a large format camera, he used a black reflector and constantly adjusted the exposure over 20 minutes to obtain an almost 3D-like contrast between the myriad shades of white in the bear’s fur and its snowy arctic surrounds.
“He walked into the museum, squinted his eyes and he realised that through the camera lens, he could make real what was unreal,” says MCA curator Megan Robson. “In making that bear come back to life, he realised that he was an artist.”
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Sugimoto’s fascination with 19th-century precursors to modern photography continued in his Portraits series, in which he photographed the likes of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, to Queen Elizabeth II and Diana, Princess of Wales – in Madame Tussauds waxworks museums. By removing the wax models from their contextual surrounds and positioning them in front of black backdrops, the artist added a layer of ambiguity, breathing life into inanimate objects.
“I make reality out of fantasy and people tend to believe it,” Sugimoto says, with delight. “They say ‘wow, Hiroshi did a photograph of Princess Diana.’ But it’s all dead – it’s a wax figure. If people believe it, then they have to question what is reality, when they can be looking at fake things and feeling they’re alive.”
Science, maths and architecture converge in all his work. In his 70s series Theaters, he condensed whole feature films into a single image, resulting in an eerie glow that emanates from the proscenium arches of a Parisian rococo theatre, or and a deserted New York art deco podium.
In Mathematical Models, Sugimoto took 19th-century German models used as teaching aids to convey three-dimensional qualities to mathematical equations and created a series of images where the scale of the objects, in reality no more than 30 cm in height, appear to tower over the viewer. The white plaster, papier-mache, wood, thread, string and metal models, which Sugimoto came across in Tokyo in 2002, captivated him in the same way Man Ray had been captivated more than half a century earlier after seeing similar models on display in Paris.
“I thought, I can do something different, or even something better than Man Ray,” Sugimoto says. He took it to the next level, using state-of-the-art technology to create human-sized sculptures – they are still mathematical models, he gently corrects – and, more recently, a 21-metre tall version that is now a public artwork in San Francisco; an earlier, smaller incarnation of it can be seen in the MCA.
“I am still making the art of photography, but it’s now three dimensional,” he says.
In his Lightning Fields series, he applied electrical charges to unprinted sheets of film, at first using an 18th-century hand-cranked electrostatic machine pioneered by Benjamin Franklin and Michael Faraday. He refined the technique by submerging the sheets in water during the discharge and using natural salts from the Himalayas, Hawaii and Japan to form lightning-like patterns on the paper that almost look like dramatic landscapes.
And in his Opticks series, he took Isaac Newton’s treatise that proved that white light was composed of multiple different colours – the harbinger of photography’s invention – and used Polaroid cameras to capture the natural winter light in his Tokyo studio, which he funnelled through on to glass prisms. The resulting photographs are not dissimilar to Mark Rothko’s signature rectangular abstracts.
Now 76, Sugimoto says “90% of my life is gone … yet I start to feel kind of nice about how the history moves from one generation to the next.”
He is working on what he believes will be his final long-term project at the Odawara Art Foundation, which he founded just outside Tokyo. “So I just keep making it,” he says. “And when I die, then that’s the end of my art.”