Tasman Sea, Rocky Cape, Hiroshi Sugimoto, 2016

Since the 1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto has worked extensively in a variety of mediums, primarily photography, but the dominant theme of his entire career has been his fascination with how the act of making a photograph manipulates time, sometimes without the creator's knowledge. According to Sugimoto's philosophy, photographers do not create images in the same way that painters do but rather take images from real life. With that said however his work isn't about documentation, at least not documenting the physicality of an environment but more so the emotional attachment associated with subverting the viewers' visual literacy. His 'Theatre' series consists of photographing empty movie theatres, often while a film is being showcased. Through intentionally long shutter speeds the viewer is left with a tantalizing loneliness, the screen bears no detail only a glowing white void that's seemed to suck the life out of its environment. The point isn't what's on the screen you've missed your chance but Sugimoto is asking you to accept stillness, and welcome the fact that you could spend your whole life waiting for the "perfect moment". His work is heavily influenced by the traditions of early authorities of the genre negating the power to influence truth through the still and "un-manipulated" image. Comparing his 'Portrait' series of wax figures or work photographing museum installations of uncanny taxidermied polar bears and ostrich to the practice of post-mortem photography as existing somewhere between the past and present, the real and imaginary. With the advent of the daguerreotype in the late 19th century death portraiture became a means of taking autonomy against the inevitable. At a time when infant mortality rates were especially high, children lived on through the still image. The concept of death, however unsettling, heavily influences the value we place in snapshots. I'm reminded of Bell Hook's essay In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life and the importance she places on the family photo album, particularly for minority communities, as a way of reinforcing positive self-reinforcement and reclaiming your identity. History doesn't end and begin with you but you exist in the context of everyone who's come before you who must've felt the same. In particular, she expresses remorse for the images of her father, "Before us, before our presence forced him to leave his life behind", and her reading of the image allows her to "understand and love her father" despite the present moment. "Such is the power of the photograph, of the image, that it can give back and take away, that it can bind". Speaking on the image below, part of a series of over 100 photographs of ocean horizons you get a sense that Sugimoto is photographing with the concept of infinity in mind. Heavily influenced by painter Mark Rothko, who through his non-representational color squares attempts to convey rather than illustrate an emotional state. There's so much room left for interpretation and I think that's such a beautiful intention to leave this space for the audience to humble themselves in the face of the unknown. These photographs are ultimately meaningless without nostalgia. What is lost or gained in the mythos of Sugimoto's interpretations of oceans or movie theatres for someone who's never experienced such places? Beauty is indirectly tied to immortality even though it's an unattainable ideal we're obsessed with the aesthetic of infinity, a concept that none of us will live to see, memento mori.