Hiroshi Sugimoto @ the Hirschorn

I saw Hiroshi Sugimoto's retrospective at the Hirschorn this week. The above images really don't do his work justice. It was kind of refreshing to read his short statements about each series. Instead of trying to convince the viewer of how something is the paradox of blah blah blah, he would just explain the technical aspect of his work. His statement about the movie images above was something about wondering what the negative would look like if he left the shutter open for the length of an entire movie.

His statement about the image of the polar bear tableau from a museum said that he found it interesting that if he squinted at their set ups, they began to look real. He also said that after you photograph something, you've recreated it all over again.
I might no disagree with that statement, unless his images gave no hint that he hadn't just set the tableaus up himself. I'm sure the exhibition designer might have something to say about that. I've spent a lot of time shooting in museums, but it's always obvious that's where I'm shooting. I guess Sugimoto wants to be the Japanese Sherry Levine, not that that's some great honor. That's not really fair though, since he did it first.