Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) La Paloma, Encinitas

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948)
La Paloma, Encinitas, 1993
Gelatin silver print; with title, edition '2/25' and number '253' blindstamped in the margin, mounted, signed, titled, dated, editioned '2/25' and numbered '253' in pencil on the mount, framed, a Fraenkel Gallery label on the reverse.
16 5/8 x 21 3/8 in. (42.2 x 54.3 cm.)
mount 20 x 25 3/4 in. (50.8 x 65.4 cm.)
Provenance
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1994

Literature
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Theaters (Italy and New York, 2016), p. 75
Theaters: Hiroshi Sugimoto (New York and London, 2000), p. 116

Note
When he was just 28 years old, Hiroshi Sugimoto found himself fascinated by the impressive role that imagery and photographs played in what he would refer to as "the global currency of perception," leading him to pursue an exploration of the mechanics of photography and film.

Recalling his first cinematic experience, Sugimoto reflected on the commonality between watching a film and dreaming, noting that the line between the two is so indistinguishable that a viewer can lose themself within the moving image, at least for a time. "I wanted to photograph a movie, with all its appearance of life and motion, in order to stop it again ... I must use photography as a means to shut away the ghosts resurrected by the excess of photographic afterimages. My dream was to capture 170,000 photographs on a single frame of film. The image I had inside my brain was of a gleaming white screen inside a dark movie theater. The light created by an excess of 170,000 exposures would be the embodiment or manifestation of something awe-inspiring and divine; perhaps that something was the 'excess of death.'" (Hiroshi Sugimoto: Theaters, 2016)

The first movie theater that Sugimoto selected for the purposes of testing his creative endeavor was St. Marks Cinema in the East Village of Manhattan, in 1976. After smuggling his large-format camera into the theater and while using a Schneider 165mm lens, he exposed the full length of the film onto his negative. The resulting image materialized in print exactly as Sugimoto had imagined it: "Something that neither existed in the real world nor was it anything that I had seen. So who had seen it, then? My answer: it was what the camera saw. It was the afterimage of a great accumulation of afterimages. The excess light was illuminating the darkness of ignorance." (Theaters, 2016)

Throughout the subsequent four decades, Sugimoto has added over a hundred theaters to this body of work, expanding the project to encompass opera houses, abandoned spaces, and drive-ins. Though the scope of his chosen theaters has varied, Sugimoto reminds us that these hallowed movie-houses are not the focus of his intent; rather, each one is a venue for capturing the ethereal magic of cinema.