Photographs by Sugimoto Hiroshi: winterspel

winterspel

Photographs by Sugimoto Hiroshi

Mar 08, 2009 12:00

You may recognize this image as the cover of the new U2 album that came out last week. (I like U2 quite a bit, but this post is not about U2.) When I saw it, my first feeling was a sense of recognition, of familiar. Friday night, I mentioned this feeling aloud to N & icajoleu, and I told them that it reminded me of an exhibit I'd seen several times in January, a small room at the Sackler Museum of photographs by Sugimoto from his ongoing series of seascapes. (N, who'd seen the exhibit once, agreed.) I had been utterly fascinated by those seascapes (which violate a photography "rule" by placing the line of the horizon exactly in the middle of the image) - they were taken all over the world and were only identified by the location and the date, and they required the viewer to stand near and study them. From a distance they could appear merely as two halves of shades of grey, of dark and light, but when you stop for a while and look, the subtlety of each seascape emerges: the texture of the water, the quality of the light, the clarity, the mist. I think I'd gone into that tiny room ten times over several visits to the Sackler and each time I'd taken some time to let those images soak into me. I was mesmerized.

icajoleu wondered if maybe Sugimoto had taken the cover photo of the new U2 album, so I checked the liner notes...and of course, he had. Which inspired this post, because I decided to share my love for his work, which I first saw in a remarkable 2006 exhibit entitled "History of History" (which I posted about here). I really love his work.

Below the cut are a collection of seascapes by Sugimoto interspersed with a few non-seascape images. When I've been able to find photo location & date, I've included it below the image.