For my first set of pictures I wanted to look at the passage of time. How to capture the passing of time in a single image – rather than a series of separate photographs taken over time.
I have been looking at the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto. He is a Contemporary Photographer, well known for his work in capturing the passage of time in single photographs, particularly with very long exposures.
He was born in 1948 in Tokyo, Japan, and was educated there, but now works in New York City. He says that he has been greatly influenced by the Dada and Surrealist movements and especially by the work of Marcel Duchamp. His work often has a surreal feel about it and is based on the idea that photography is a time machine. It is a way of capturing and preserving memory and time.For his passage of time work he uses a large format camera (8”x10”) and often extremely long exposures – typically many hours. The work covers many themes, but three are really well known.
The first theme is the interior view of an old-style cinema, where he captures the whole of the film being shown - as in picture below. The length of the exposure is probably around two hours, so all the images of the film combine to make a bright blank screen with even light. The light from the screen gives the seats and wall decorations an eerie glow – a lighting effect that is enhanced by the long exposure. This is a clever, but simple image. When you stop and examine the picture you see that it does show the passage of time and has a great composition.
Sugimoto is famous for his seascape pictures. They have been used by people for record covers and books. The exposures are usually over a day. His Boden Sea picture is shown below. He simply points the camera out to sea and puts the horizon halfway up the image. The combination of all the clouds that have passed by during the day leave a featureless sky, but interestingly wave patterns on the sea can still be seen. The minimalistic aspect of these pictures really appeals to me. It is a seascape, but in an intriguing way. The sea takes on a particular look – almost like it consists of a liquid much thicker than water.
In his most recent work Sugimoto makes pictures with the electrical discharges from a small Van de Graaf generator. He doesn’t actually take a photograph of the electrical discharge. The technique is to arrange an electrical discharge from the generator directly onto a large photographic dry plate. The picture below shows an amazing image created this way. Here the passage of time is, of course, very small indeed. This is the opposite, in terms of time captured, of the cinema and seascape pictures. Instead of an exposure of hours, here it is only a split second. The results are quite beautiful.
What I have learned from Sugimoto’s work is that passage of time pictures don’t have to be complex. His techniques are very simple, but effective. His work also reminds me that the passage of time can be about very short events – not just those over long periods of time.
Sources of pictures
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