Horizons #22/100

About fifteen years ago (in 2006), I went to see an exhibition of photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Hirshhorn in Washington DC. I was transfixed. I’d spent the first part of the morning in the East Wing of the National Gallery, gazing into the depths of Rothko’s blues. Somehow the Sugimoto “Seascapes” felt the same. A magical illusion of endless depth performed on the surface of an image. I remember that they were displayed in a dark room. The walls were painted slate grey and the light were off. The photographs were printed on some sort of translucent material and lit from behind. I understood the technical aspects of Hiroshi’s craft. How he experimented with exposure lengths to move the image from representational to abstract. This reminded me of my Polaroid camera and how I’d come to favor the ones that turned out looking more like paintings than photographs. “Horizons” tries to recapture all of these feelings. In full saturation. Multiple exposures burning a composition onto the backlit screen.