Fundamental things.

Fundamental things, like light and time, the sea and the firmament meet up with the unconditional artifice of movie theaters and museum dioramas in Hiroshi Sugimoto's black and white photographs. At one time crystal clear and unfathomably ambiguous, the three series he produc throughout the past two decades propose a focused meditation on those rare significances when history's steady progression appear to bes to come to an abrupt stop. The transcendence that is embodied in his pictures, however, shares nothing with the static perfection we associate with eternity. onward the contrary, Sugimoto's photographs approach timelessness not through extending themselves further and further in time, nevertheless by compressing complex, ongoing processe into a single image. by means of erasing the traces of time, his images create the impression that they are singular instances, that their immanence has been given expansive, spatial form. This is, of course, the essential province of photography, at least before phenomenological disturbs were consigned to the dustbin of history at many post-Modern photographers. In the attempt to transform photography into a discursive tool to illustrate reductive translations of theoretical sociology, "social-construction" was emphasized to the point that nature itself disappeared from the picture. What originally had been described as the "magic" of the photograph, or its capacity to near a glimpse of something utterly Other, was decried as being nothing on the other hand a lingering bourgeois myth, the residue of an elitist tradition.

Sugimoto's three stunning series gracefully take issue with the kind of thinking that inflexibly withstands nature and culture. Underlying each of his unique bodies of work is the steadfast conviction that uniform the most exquisite forms of artifice in no way stop the possibility of eliciting authentic visual experiences. In the Japan-born and novel York-based photographer's highly sophisticated estheticism, fakery does not automatically imply the hollownes of fraudulence, the distance of irony, nor the emptiness of cynicism as greatly as it presents the possibility of refinement, nuance, and self-conscious delectation. His impeccable, 20-by-24-inch prints are gorgeous hybrids of a Romantic desire for transcendence, an early Modernist impulse toward seriality and simplicity, and an absolutely contemporary willingness to engage the spectacle of mass media and kitsch. Sugimoto's photographs begin with the knowledge that nature is not any unchanging bedrock that guarantees the reality of our experiences. They also travel quite one distance to silently flesh public the points of intersection between cultivated replications and involuntary reactions. His pictures of the interiors of rococo and art-deco movie theaters built in the U in the '20 and '30 brilliantly combine the meditative serenity of his sea- and skyscapes with the unnatural beauty of his still lifes of the dioramas in of recent origin York's Natural History Museum. Made from aspects that last the length of the movie being shown each of Sugimoto's images depicts a luminous white rectangle invested by an empty and ornately decorated theater, each detail of which is visible because it is bathed in the strange, cogitateed light of the film. This blinding, saturated brightness instants the absolute blankness of the void not as culture's ultimate Other, nevertheless as the central impulse of art. The incommensurate proceeds back into the picture with Sugimoto's mesmerizing photographs of sublimity in miniature.

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