concept:era contemporary
Hiroshi Sugimoto — Theaters (series), 1978–present
Theaters (劇場), 1978–present, by Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948). Series of large-format gelatin silver prints. Various collections including Guggenheim Museum, New York; MoMA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Each print is made by photographing a cinema or drive-in theater with an exposure equal to the full duration of a film screening — the entire film condenses to a glowing white rectangle.
Scholarly Significance
Anchor Hiroshi Sugimoto's conceptual photography practice with the Theaters series — a sustained meditation on time, cinema, and the condensation of duration into a single exposure.
Notes
- ·The series began at the UA Playhouse theater in New York in 1978 — Sugimoto's first realisation of the long-duration concept.
- ·The technical method: Sugimoto opens the shutter at the start of a film and closes it at the film's end. The entire motion-picture duration collapses into a single still image.
- ·The result: the cinema screen becomes a brilliant white rectangle, the only light source in the image; the theater architecture is revealed by the ambient glow.
- ·The concept engages Benjamin's notion of 'optical unconscious' — photography revealing what the eye cannot see in real time.
- ·Theaters in the series range from classic 1920s–1950s movie palaces (Cabot Street Cinema, Beverly Theater) to derelict drive-ins.
- ·The drive-in variants (begun 1993) replace the elaborate theater interior with open night skies.
- ·The works raise a question fundamental to all photography: if the image is the trace of time, what does it mean to compress all of a film's time into one frame?