sugimoto

on stopping time

It was a dead polar bear that convinced Hiroshi Sugimoto of the power his work could have. The Japanese photographer was in his late twenties when he saw it, one of the animals in the dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, which sits next to Central Park in New York. He’d moved to the city and it was here, among the crocodiles of children on school trips and idling tourists, that he realised he could “see the world as a camera does”.

The dioramas look fake but Sugimoto’s photo - of a polar bear inspecting a bleeding penguin - doesn’t. He said this was when his life as an artist began; when he saw that he “succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film.”

The polar bear sits at the end of the first room of the Sugimoto exhibition that’s in its final days at the Hayward Gallery. For months passed the billboard pasted onto the building’s fat chimney on the bus; one of his better-known works, a hazy blend of sea and sky, with his name in a fat serif font laid on top. What you quickly learn inside the show is that Sugimoto’s work is about time and trickery. He makes mischief with the camera, bringing the dead to life and making the visible invisible. When his work is it as its best it makes you question time and boundaries and perception.

We see the show a few days before Christmas and almost exactly seven years since we last saw a Sugimoto show, by accident, while away for a long weekend in Amsterdam. A ghostly full moon is rising as we get there; the next day will be the shortest of the year and nine months since the baby arrived exactly on his due date. I am ripe with the significance of time. There has to be something here, among all these numerical markers, to express the heaviness it instills in me.