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Installation view of HIROSHI SUGIMOTO’s “Le Notti Bianche” at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2017. Photo by Giorgio Perottino. Courtesy Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
When early 20th-century filmmakers such as DW Griffith began to include more than one scene in their films, a complex variety of techniques arose to imply the continuity of time and space. Even before then, early masters like George Méliès exploited the illusion in the format’s foundation—turning a series of still images into a smooth representation of the passage of time—to bring magic to the screen.
The mechanics of this illusion permitted one of the earliest discoveries in Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s career when, as a young man, he took photographs of Audrey Hepburn on the silver screen with a shutter speed of one-thirtieth of a second, and captured a single frame. Now, after many prolific years, he has revisited the nature of time and cinema in a new series of photographs, all taken in Italy and exhibited at Turin’s Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
Since his first forays into photography, illusion has played a major role in Sugimoto’s work. His breakthrough series of “Dioramas” (1974–2012) comprised photographs of stuffed animals in New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which appeared deceptively authentic when reproduced through the reduced perspective of the photographic lens. Similarly, his series of “Portraits” (1999– ) consisted of black-and-white photographs of famous figures whose true subjects, in fact, were waxworks from Madame Tussaud’s.
Sugimoto relocated to New York in 1974, and two years later started to take photographs of old American movie theaters. Captured with his apparatus of choice—a turn-of-the-century box camera—these extreme long-exposure shots sought to capture an entire film in a single image, resulting in visions of glowing white screens that subtly illuminate the spaces that house them.
In his Italian explorations, which began several years ago, Sugimoto replaced classic American movie palaces with some of Italy’s most beautiful old theaters. A key point of departure is that many of these Mediterranean buildings were not originally intended to house screens. In an act of appropriation recalling Sugimoto’s mentor Marcel Duchamp, the photographer often installed ones of his own. There was consequently the sense that these buildings, at least in their intended states, are not the true subjects here. Likewise, the films Sugimoto chose to screen—all classics of Italian or italophilic cinema—rarely appear to have relevance beyond their relation to the southern European nation—The Italian Job (1969) might have been screened in Turin, where the film was set, but this is as deep as it goes.
The true subject here is the passage of time. Before a screen, our attention is diverted from the real time of the world to that of the film’s diegesis. When the entire duration is reduced to a singularity, however, the surrounding space is both literally and figuratively illuminated. The screens bathe the wooden pillars in Teatro Farnese Parma, 2015, Salò (Screen Side) (2015) and the ornate gilding in Teatro Carignano, Turin, 2016 (Screen Side) (2016) in an eerie glow, while the reduction of an entire narrative to a frozen white rectangle highlights that the surrounding space, though apparently static, is subject to time’s unfailing movement.
In these images, Sugimoto has also turned his camera around to capture the spaces facing the screen—whether they contain seats, as in Teatro Goldoni Bagnacavallo, 2015, Il Gattopardo (Seating Side) (2015), or are simply empty, as in Villa Mazzacorrati Bologna, 2015, Le Notti Bianche (Seating Side) (2015). This draws attention to the absent audience, rendering the theaters uncanny, even post-apocalyptic. However, quirks in the show’s curation served to fill this absence. The prints were mounted on temporary walls that partitioned each of the gallery’s two rooms, with one image showing a projector screen, often beneath some proscenium arch, and it’s opposite an auditorium, so that a suggestive space was created between each pair. In a further idiosyncrasy, each print reflected light from the gallery’s ceiling-mounted lamps onto the floor, casting luminous trapezoids that seemed to originate from the screens themselves. Aided by this environmental quality, Sugimoto’s works invite us not only to appreciate some of Italy’s most beautiful theaters—some already hundreds of years old—but to step into suspended moments in time, and thus consider its bearing on even the grandest of our constructions.
Installation view of HIROSHI SUGIMOTO’s “Le Notti Bianche” at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2017. Photo by Giorgio Perottino. Courtesy Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s new works are on view in “Le Notti Bianche” at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, until October 1, 2017.
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