More on Hiroshi Sugimoto

"While Sugimoto's photographs date from the mid to late 1980s to the present day, he relates that it was in the period after he moved to New York when he conceived of the idea for his three series: Dioramas, Theatres and Seascapes. He started to work on them concurrently in 1976-77. In fact, he is continuously adding to each series, refining and expanding them. These series have no past or present, they are in effect all produced simultaneously, creating his own sense of time."

Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole. (1997). Towards the End of Time: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p7.

"Sugimoto is not only trying to relate his vision, he is trying to alter ours."

"Sugimoto's photographs resonate with tradition. They reflect his love of object, detail, and technique - the traditional purvey of classical photography. His techniques play on those of Louis Daguerre, the 19th-century originator of the daguerreotype, one of the first photographic techniques. The camera Sugimoto uses is not far from the one that Daguerre might have used. Departing from Daguerre's photographs and dioramas which he created in the 1820s in Paris, Sugimoto's series are tableaux which move the images away from becoming just a memory or entertainment and into the more encompassing realm of art and into an exploration of meaning"

"In his Seascape series he takes what appears to be untouched landscape and inverts it to show that while land (sea)scape may appear constant it is in fact both temporal and subject to human definitions. Sugimoto himself states that the sea is 'an early example of human naming something outside the world inside himself'"

Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole. (1997). Towards the End of Time: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p8.

"Photography can be seen as a time machine, for it freezes a moment, preserving it for the future. But whose future?"

"Sugimoto's series Hall of Thirty-Three Bays certainly points to his concern and indeed the eternal concern for the end of time. But Sugimoto's work is more about human conceptions of time, and millennialism is but one, albiet dramatic, manifestation. Sugimoto's series are all explorations into definitions, and as stated abovee provide a language through which we can access certain polemic questions that keep arising. Sugimoto is a contemporary artist and his conerns are in tune with current concerns, but his sense of time/space reflects not time as linear, but many different times: there is buddhist time, time cycles, tides, merchant's time, farmer's time, photographic time and serial time. Each time is a human construct, for it must be constructed for us to be able to perceive it as such. By restructuring our vision, Sugimoto challenges us to reposition our role in this production"

Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole. (1997). Towards the End of Time: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p16.

"The skyscrapers stand still, but their shadows race. Roads stay the same but the cars on them become transparent; at night their headlights form red and white rivers. Now place a body in that space: it participates in all these velocities at once. When swept up in high-velocity systems such as transportation, money, information, the body virtually disappears, just like the cars. But the body also inhabits medium-speed spaces: in the place where it sleeps, for hours at a time, nothing moves. Inside the body, processes are slower yet: once formed, the bones stabilize permanently; over a life-time the brain and other organs decay quite gradually.Sugimoto is like that. At first sight his images could be mistaken for Platonic forms, outside time, perfect. But like Metabolist analyses of the environment's different speeds, they isolate and separate the layered velocities across which the subject moves. When consciousness is placed, for instance, inside the cinematic system, whose images pulse at a regular 24-per-second, it quickly joins the speed of the apparatus, and mostly enjoys the show. Yet however absorbed inside the high-speed of the screen, some residential branch of consciousness remains behind to monitor the auditorium, where other and slower speeds obtain; the motionless confinement of the theatre that is is known to the bones and the Sitzfleisch; the unchanging architecture of the movie theatre's interior (at least of the interiors that Sugimoto chooses to photograph). As a subject of cinema the moviegoer is lost inside the apparatus - she or he literally disappears, like the evaporated cars in the speeded-up cityscape, or the banished movie on the screen"

Bryson, Norman. (1997). Hiroshi Sugimoto's Metabolic Photography. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p16.