PHOTOGRAPHY BY HIROSHI SUGIMOTO
Imagine you’re standing in the last row of an empty theater, gazing at the screen while a movie is being shown. Now, take a photograph. Could anything be simpler? Would anyone call it “Art?”
In 1976, when Hiroshi Sugimoto—an unknown graduate from Tokyo of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, newly arrived in New York—began his now celebrated series “Theaters,” I suspect most people would have answered both questions “no.”
But over the past forty years, contemporary art—especially, thoughtful conceptual art—and the ways we think about photography have changed dramatically, due largely to artists like Sugimoto.
The idea for “Theaters,” according to Sugimoto, began with “a near-hallucinatory vision.” As “a habitual self-interlocutor,” he says, one evening he asked himself what would result if you shot “a whole movie in a single frame?” “You get a shining screen.”
So, disguised “as a tourist” he snuck a big large-format camera into the St. Marks Cinema, a rundown neighborhood movie house in the East Village. And when the movie started, he says, “I fixed the shutter at a wide open aperture.” Two hours later when the movie finished, he clicked the shutter closed. The radiant and somewhat mysterious “shining screen” had provided the necessary illumination to reveal in dark grays the theater’s interior, but it was also the sum of some 173,000 individual images (calculated at a rate of 24 fps) which had flashed for a fraction of a second during the 120-minute-long exposure.
Albeit quietly and politely, the idea that a photograph is some sort of “fact”—or accurately transcribes what a human witness sees or remembers—was under assault. Moreover, Sugimoto offered his own wonderfully abstract solution to the problem of depicting passing time pictorially—something artists have wrestled with in various ways over the centuries: in the predella panels of altarpieces (narratives to be read like comic strips), by choosing a story’s “decisive moment” (as true of Vermeer’s genre paintings as Cartier Bresson’s photo-journalism), or like some of Picasso’s Cubist paintings or Duchamp’s celebrated “Nude Descending a Staircase,” by simultaneously showing a face or figure in motion from several angles at once.
But while Sugimoto focused on how the abstract issue of time might be handled by artists more imaginatively, as a more practical matter his sense of timing was also impeccable. A remarkably diverse wave of younger conceptual artists would soon be shaking up the New York art work, and between the mid-1970s and 1980–a century and half after the invention of the daguerreotype—photography was finally poised to escape its second class status and become the preferred tool and medium of many of America’s best emerging artists. Some, like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, would even take aim at eliminating the last apologetic vestiges of painterliness found in such increasingly respectable older rivals as Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, and Ed Ruscha.
Meanwhile, movie theaters remained, comparatively speaking, a reasonably healthy business.
This month, a handsomely produced, definitive, revised, expanded, updated—and affordable—monograph of Sugimoto’s epic series of movie palace photographs, Theaters, will be jointly published by Damiani Editore and Matsumoto Editions after 16 years out of print, presenting some 135 works in the chronological order in which they were taken. It is nothing if not a revelation.
While more than half of the Theaters series was made in the greater New York area or southern California (including a stunning series of drive-ins taken in 1993-1994), movie houses in 8 other U.S. states are featured, as are cinemas, concert halls and an occasional opera house farther afield, including Tokyo, Paris, Vienna, and particularly Italy.
One of the great pleasures of Theaters reminds me of the way the eye gradually adjusts to a dark room. You cannot quite escape at first their seeming formal sameness— the “silver screen” resembling, say, a grisaille answer to an Albers “Homage to the Square” or a florescent Yves Klein monochrome set in an outlandishly inappropriate frame. Then, gradually, you begin to sense and see the remarkable individual variety of the images—how the shape of the screen, for instance, radically affects composition, or how your perception of what the picture is “about” changes as you are drawn irresistibly into the rich diversity of the architecture shown.
Some depict celebrated American movie “palaces” of the 1920s—inspired by sumptuous kitsch variations on ancient Egypt, renaissance Italy, and Moorish Spain. Others depict the stripped down, profit-oriented “recalibration” of cinemas (begun in the 1930s by architects working for the movie industry) to “neutralize” space and thereby increase audience “immersion” in the films being shown. Then, in Sugimoto’s more recent work (particularly those taken in provincial Italy), you find the architectural antecedents that inspired America’s first theater designers.
Theaters’ most poignant images—taken in U.S. cities like Newark, Gary, and Detroit which have still not recovered from decades of urban flight—show epic tinsel ruins of plaster and rebar that look as old as Rome but with a more familiar and intimate sadness. As for the intriguing question of what films Sugimoto actually saw while creating Theaters, he’s always maintained a stoic public silence. However, when the New York Times sent him on assignment to Italy last fall, the editors evidently thought this needed to be revealed. Fellini’s “Il Vitelloni” was his choice in Mantua for the Teatro Scientifico, and at the Teatro Villa Aldrovandi-Mazzacorrati in Bologna, he chose Viscounti’s “Le Notti Bianche.” I’m delighted to know. But it cannot dispel the haunting mystery and magic of Sugimoto’s works.
