(Tokyo, Japan, 1948 - )
1980
Selenium toned gelatin silver print
16 5/8 x 21 1/4 in. (42.2 x 54.1 cm)
Collection of the Akron Art Museum
Museum Acquisition Fund
1996.12
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Over the past thirty years, Sugimoto has worked on only a handful of subjects including movie theaters and seascapes. In the Theaters series, Sugimoto was interested in the possibility of physically recording the passage of time in a still image. Leaving the shutter of his large-format camera open for the duration of an entire film resulted in an otherworldly image of a glowing screen. “My dream was to capture 170,000 photographs on a single frame of film. The image I had inside my brain was of a gleaming white screen inside a dark movie theater. The light created by the excess of exposures would be the embodiment or manifestation of something awe-inspiring and divine.”