Imagining our environment: Hiroshi Sugimoto
Research for my PhD took us last weekend to the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg and an exhibition of the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The Japanese-born New Yorker Sugimoto has been exhibiting since 1987 and is recognised as one of the outstanding contemporary photographers. Contemporary, but using almost archaic photographic equipment and practices, such as an old 19th century large-image camera, and an army of assistants touching up the black and white prints by hand.
It is this approach, along with the subject matter, that now draws me to Sugimoto as a case study of how we ‘talk’ about - in visual and verbal languages - and therefore represent the environment.
Why the environment?
Many of Sugimoto’s images are of, or relate to, how we experience the environment, both built and ‘natural’. Some of his most arresting images are of architecture in slow exposure (blurred) focus, teasing out how great design is strengthened by reconnecting with its more impressionistic, ‘yet to be realised’ image in the architect’s mind: what the design must have first ‘felt’ like. This urge to reconnect what we experience is the present with what we have experienced in the past, either internal or external to ourselves, is central to Sugimoto’s work, and is the kernal for perhaps his most emotive and powerful work, his Seascapes.
The origins of environment
Much of Sugimoto’s work comes from his “internal question-answer sessions” where he poses questions to himself. The Seascapes come from the question he had one day: “is it possible to visualise the sea as primitive man once saw it, in its orignal, pristine state?”
To visualise or represent never-before experienced environmental phenomena, and the urge or need to name and in that way control our experience of the thing, if not the thing itself, results in an affective and beautiful, constant, series of pictures.
The ocean is not a new form for art, and as such is not easy to represent in fresh or interesting ways. But Sugimoto has achieved this through this return, or more correctly turn, towards not the origin of the ocean, but the urge within ourselves for origin, to understand the event of origin such as the first experience of some phenomena. And, following the theorist Danziger, within the images themselves are the coded response that the first human could have made when seeing the ocean:
Just as the oceans visible face hides processes of infinite complexity, so do modern images of it encode a concealed cultural history. The rectangular frame of a painting or photograph has so often contained that classic view; sea at the bottom, sky at the top, horizon separating two bulks of colour and texture. Danziger, J., American Photographs 1900/2000, New York, Assouline 2000
This is what you get when you witness a Sugimoto image of the ocean (and of the seas, such as the Aegian, and lakes, such as Superior). Of this series Sugimoto has said:
Naming things has something to do with human awareness, with the separation of the entire world from you. So with the Seascapes I was thinking about the most ancient of human impressions. The time when man first named the world around him, the Sea…[the Seascapes] all look alike, but they are located at different places in different countries, and the oceans have different names.
As is discussed at length in Derrida’s On The Name and elsewhere, the power of naming is a profound and fundamental processing of the logocentrisms that have defined our cultures and civilisations. A reflection on the naming and representation of the largest single natural phenomenon we experience–the ocean–is, I believe Sugimoto is saying, singularly well placed to tell us something of our relationship with the environment.
Pines
The idea of naming is one of controlling what we experience of what we see and feel. And a reflection upon our control of nature, our manicuring of its forms and accumulation of its resources, is present in another striking set of images: those of Japanese pines, a tree which holds noble significance in Japanese history and art (particularly the tightly manipulated Noh form of theatre).
With the pines, Sugimoto is entering into a process of honki-dori, which is the traditional Japanese term for a celebrated and well respected act of ‘copying’ or replication of a previous artist/master’s work. In this case, it is the Shotozu (pines forest screen) of Hasegawa Tohaku (1539-1610) whose original Indian ink drawings on thin paper hang in the National Museum of Tokyo. Sugimoto said that his approach was one that ‘metabolised’ the work of Tohaku to create a renewed image, a new fiction. His pines are reassembled photographs of the Imperial Palace pines, trees which are impossibly manicured, which Sugimoto calls the “ultimate articificality - the perfect fiction of a real place”.
In the photographs the artifice is redoubled. The panels seem at first to be put together as a faithful rendition of the landscape which Sugimoto has photographed, but on close inspection (not much closer - this is not hidden) only the horizon line is constant; the photographs are six separate shots rather than one, taking with a soft-focus. The panels themselves disorient, like badly hung wallpaper with some patterns joining, others at a disjunct.
“Once you take a photograph, everything is real”
The impossible disjunct between environment and experience is a theme that continues in Sugimoto’s Diorama series. These are the photographs which drew, for the first time, a significant amount of the public’s attention. They are dioramas from the the Museum of Natural History in New York, and depict models of prehistory and natural history in front of painted backgrounds. According to the programme notes for the Salzburg exhibition: “Their environment is designed to match their natural environment. The skilful arrangement of plastic pieces of landscape, blending into the painted background, scarcely noticeable, leads to an almost perfect illusion.”
And indeed, even up close and at eight foot square, it’s difficult to notice where the join starts and ends. As Sugimoto says, “I found that if I took a quick peek, then they looked real. So I found a way to repeat what the camera sees. Once you take a photograph, everything is real.”
There is for me an important relationship between our experiences of nature and our cultural representations of those experiences in the work of Sugimoto. The large images, the approach focused on the flawless image (and therefore an unnatural nature?) are driven by Sugimoto’s belief in Barthes’ ideal that “whatever a photo presents to the eye and however it may be arranged, it is in all instances invisible: it is not the photo that one sees.”
But if it is not the photo, is it then nature? Are representations of the environment a desire for a flawless, perfect fiction?
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