Eternal Photographs

Hiroshi Sugimoto: 7 Days/7Nights
Gagosian Gallery
November 6, 2008-Saturday February 14, 2009

Trying to make time into a visual experience is tricky because it isn’t something we usually visualize in ways that aren’t symbolic. So how do you make something about time that isn’t overly symbolic and isn’t over the top kitsch? That is exactly the question Hiroshi Sugimoto answers with his series of Seascapes in 7days/7Nights. The vastness of both the idea of time and the content of each photograph is exactly what works about these large silver-gelatin prints.
The exhibition, designed by Sugimoto himself, is made up of two rooms: the front room is a bright, sun-drenched space with a high, sky lighted ceiling and the back is pitch black and sparingly lit. In each room the long back wall holds seven of the massive Seascapes placed evenly next to each other in succession. Each is a misty morning or night of sea and sky that runs out of the frame and in toward the middle horizon at the same time. Everything about these photographs is silent. Not a sound comes out of them or can be heard around them. They absorb the moment like a sponge.
The back room is utterly iconic and yet reveals the cheap parlor trick that photography is. It’s part magic and part hoax, part insight and part visual game. The track light above projects a concentrated beam onto seven dark, large scale photographs surrounded by a white background. The room is completely black and the white seems to radiate light like an intense aura around an icon. But, if you get too close to the photographs it’s easy to see how fragile the illusion really is. The white margins of reflected light only work from a distance and once you walk up to examine them the illusion is quickly revealed and the world returns to normal.
These are photographs in which time has stopped and yet nothing has ended or begun within them. Only slowly and in no particular order does the horizon make itself out between sea and sky. Most of the time it is too misty to find the exact point they differentiate from each other; an easy metaphor for time itself. Each moment fades into the next generally without much definition. It is endless, like the sky and the sea. The simplicity of this idea is refreshing and scary. It’s nice that in a world where so much is complex that this one thing could be so easy to grasp, but the fear of the unknown always lurks over the horizon.