I went to see the work of this wonderful Japanese photographer in Edinburgh this week. The main part of the exhibition was a spectacular series of "light drawings" made by generating electrical discharges onto film. Sugimoto uses a Van den Graff generator with a discharge wand of 400000 volts to create the "artificial lightning". The question he asks is: "Are these artworks or primal lifeforms?"
He also experimented with very old negatives, 160 years old, by the first photographer, Fox Talbot, and enlarged them greatly. The results (no image available here as light too low in gallery and I was photographing surreptitiously anyway) were ghostly portraits of long gone people, much more haunting than the developed photograph would be. Of these works, he says they express "inner phenomena that painting cannot depict".
Sugimoto is known for photographing architecture. Of modernism, he approvingly says that the abandonment of superfluous decoration was a great step. He photographs modernist masterpieces such as La Savoie by Corbusier with a very soft focus, finding that "sup
erlative architecture survies the onslaught of blurred photography". I will add a photo here at some point. I have his book of architectural photographs.
He did a series of portraits from the wax figures in Madame Tussauds. Only one example was shown here as part of his earlier work. The wax maquette of Henry VIII was meticulously based on Holbein's contemporary painting. Here is Sugimoto's translation, apologies for the blurred and snatched photo, already small.
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