Hiroshi Sugimoto - Time Machine

When we talk about time, what we're really talking about is memory. Time is the framework around which we organise and make sense of our lived experience, our memories of the past, and our aspirations for the future. Hiroshi Sugimoto's landmark retrospective 'Time Machine' at London's Hayward Gallery is a masterful exploration of time as memory. Bringing together collections of work spanning five decades, this exhibition transports the viewer from the epic wilderness of our ancient planet to the hazy uncertainty of the distant future, sometimes at breakneck speed and sometimes at a snail's pace. 

The exhibition opens with Sugimoto's carefully composed wildlife photography from our primitive planet. Careful lighting and long exposures allow Sugimoto to transform the American Museum of Natural History's gaudy and obviously fake dioramas into impossibly real reportage of a long-forgotten Earth.

Later on, he pulls off the same trick with Madame Tussauds' notoriously uncanny waxwork figures, bringing to life numerous historical protagonists from Ann of Cleves to Oscar Wilde. In both cases he manages to lend a nostalgic sense of familiarity to subjects not known by anyone alive, toying with the idea of collective memory and the apparent certainty of historic record.

In his 'Theaters' series, Sugimoto compresses entire films into single exposures. Whole movies condensed into solitary rectangles of brilliant white light, illuminating all but empty theatres in various states of disrepair.

Using his ancient bellows camera, smuggled into various grand theatres and drive-thru cinemas, Sugimoto plays with the idea of storytelling, hinting at how stories can fade into obscurity as time passes on.

Similarly, in his 'Architecture' series, Sugimoto stress-tests the idiosyncrasy of 'superlative Architecture' by shooting the world's most famous buildings at a wide-open aperture, completely out of focus. Despite lacking all detail, these buildings are instantly recognisable, proving the strength of their legacy as they thrive in our collective consciousness. An alternative reading of these photos is that the blurred image captures the building's inception, the embryonic idea in the mind of the architect. These contrasting meanings look both forward and backwards in time and memory from an architectural epicentre.

In 'Seascapes' and 'Lightning Fields' Sugimoto plays with time at its polar extremes to tame the natural world. In the latter, Sugimoto purposefully exposes unexposed film to a flash of static electricity, embracing a once-frustrating studio mis-hap to capture and immortalise an infinitesimally brief lightning strike.

In the former, he captures in signature monochrome various seascapes around the world. The simplicity of the repeated composition anonymises the locations and divorces them from their geographical and temporal context. They portray the sea as eternal and unchanging, captured by the camera in the here and now.

The endless and unforgiving 'seascapes' stand in stark contrast to the instantaneously destructive 'lightning fields', but both allude to the origins of life itself; water, air and the spark of energy; the lightning strike in the primordial soup. Sugimoto is showing us the lifespan of life itself and asking us to consider where we fit in, and how we make sense of it. Through his art, Sugimoto makes us collectively remember that which we didn't experience, whilst simultaneously challenging our most steadfast recollections. When something ephemeral can be immortalised indefinitely, and something eternal can be compressed to an instant, it makes us question the concept of time itself. It is all at once terrifyingly diminishing and joyously uplifting.

By Rob Waters