Reality Check
I went to the Met yesterday to see their “Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography” exhibit. It wasn’t very extensive. Two rooms with works by Gregory Crewdson, Philip Lorca DiCorcia and Taryn Simon amongst others. A short way into the first room there was this;
Personally I love Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work, but felt that this picture, sitting alongside the others, just fell completely flat. Conceptually, what he does is excellent- but I couldn’t avoid the feeling that repetition and variation is extremely important to the power of his work. Scale. Without the other pictures in the series, this lonely example was isolated and without impact. More so than any of the other pictures in the exhibit. But equally, I also feel that shown in a series, his work is far more powerful than the whole of the “Reality Check” exhibition. In particular (and perhaps inevitably), I love this series;
Here’s what Sugimoto says about it on his web site;
I’m a habitual self-interlocutor. Around the time I started photographing at the Natural History Museum, one evening I had a near-hallucinatory vision. The question-and- answer session that led up to this vision went something like this: Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behind my eyes.
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:14 am
That series by Sugimoto is probably my favorite photographic work of all time. What you say about his work being more powerful in context is made evident by the compressed films. I always thought that Andrey Tarkovsky would have loved the idea.