Lightning Fields

Courtesy Hiroshi Sugimoto

"Arrangement of Botanical Specimens, 1839" (2007). Toned gelatin silver print (from a negative by William Henry Fox Talbot), 37 x 30 in.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto likes to work only with natural light. His photography studio on the 11th floor of a Chelsea warehouse has north-facing windows that offer spectacular panoramic views over Manhattan. On the day I visit, assistants, working in conditions of laboratory cleanliness, are using a large vacuum press to mount prints from his latest series: photographs of mannequins dressed in avant-garde fashion from the collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute. Sugimoto refers to their couture volumes — theatrical pieces by Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and others — as "stylized sculpture," and has portrayed the clothes almost as mathematical forms. Sixty years old, laconic and soft-spoken, Sugimoto has long been a kind of philosopher-scientist, concerned with experiments in light and time.

On one wall of the studio there is a huge board that looks like a cross between an abacus and a game of Battleship. Using different colored pins, it records the distribution of more than a thousand of Sugimoto’s photographs; his celebrated series — begun in the mid-1970s — of natural history museum dioramas, seascapes, movie theaters, and portraits of wax figures. "Unlike a computer," says Sugimoto, "this system never crashes." I ask if the gold pins, of which there are many, represent prints in museum collections. "You’ve cracked the code," an assistant says, smiling. Sugimoto nods: "Museums are the final destination."

While Sugimoto’s photographs of museum dioramas and waxworks play with our notion of the uncanny, capturing the already frozen in time, his theaters are exercises in time’s passing. In Sugimoto’s pictures of American cinemas and drive-ins, exposed for the duration of a film, the audience registers only as a fidgety, ghostly blur and the screen becomes a luminous white space that retains no trace of a fleeting picture.

In many ways, these images take us back to the beginning of photography, when long exposures were a technical necessity. In Daguerre’s photograph of the Boulevard du Temple, taken 170 years ago, the streets and sidewalks are empty of traffic; only a man with his foot on a crate stands still enough — because he is having his boots polished — to become the first person ever caught on camera. If Sugimoto has always explored photography’s philosophical possibilities — capturing time in light — he’s now gone back to its literal origins. He recently embarked on a project to buy as many of William Henry Fox Talbot’s paper negatives as he could ("not cheap," he tells me), and has been making his own prints from them.

Sugimoto has also made a pilgrimage to Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, where the British gentleman-scientist invented the negative/positive photographic process. Unlike the daguerreotype, the Polaroid of its day, Talbot’s process allowed for multiple prints to be made of each photograph. When soaked in oil, Talbot’s paper negatives became transparent, and could be contact printed onto several sheets of silver chloride-sensitized paper. Many of these images have appropriately magical titles: A Grove of Trees at Lacock Abbey from the Point of View of a Mouse (Talbot’s wife referred to the small boxes with which Talbot snared these pictures as "mousetrap cameras"); The Ghost of a Plant; The Soliloquy of the Broom.

Talbot’s images were often tinted lavender, lemon yellow, fire orange, and purplish brown by the chemicals with which he experimented. Sugimoto has been trying to mimic the methods Talbot used and many of his prints, or "retracings" as Talbot referred to them, are also toned with these rich hues. One, which hangs on his study wall, is deep blue, like a nocturne, and the botanical specimen it depicts is so dark as to be scarcely visible. "Most of Talbot’s first tests were done in 1836, so this is from one of the earliest negatives," Sugimoto explains of this mysterious image. "It’s from a photogram; Talbot was a botanist as well and he placed a sample from his collection of plants on photosensitive paper and left it outside in the sunlight for a day."