Hiroshi Sugimoto
[Photographer, b. 1948, Tokyo, lives in New York.]
If I already have a vision, my work is almost done. The rest is a technical problem.
People have been reading photography as a true document, at the same time they are now getting suspicious. I am basically an honest person, so I let the camera capture whatever it captures... whether you believe it or not is up to you; it’s not my responsibility, blame my camera, not me.
I live in the shadow... I like shadow, that’s why I became a black and white photographer.
Fossils work almost the same way as photography... as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography.
I’m inviting the spirits into my photography. It’s an act of God.
When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan—at least in Japanese. The word
shashin, for photograph, combines the characters
sha, meaning to reflect or copy, and
shin, meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth.
My method is different from the one most photographers use. I do not go around and shoot. I usually have a specific vision, just by myself. One night I thought of taking a photographic exposure of a film at a movie theater while the film was being projected. I imagined how it could be possible to shoot an entire movie with my camera. Then I had the clear vision that the movie screen would show up on the picture as a white rectangle. I thought it could look like a very brilliant white rectangle coming out from the screen, shining throughout the whole theater. It might seem very interesting and mysterious, even in some way religious.
Before the invention of movies was the invention of photography. To make a movie, you have to sew single-shot photographic images together to make it look like a movie. It is all an illusion to the human eye.
