Went to see the Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibit at the MFA last night amid thoughts of death and Creeley. Sugimoto's cinema photographs have long been a favorite series of mine, and I have recently become acquainted with the seascapes by way of Rachel.
Interesting to view these works through the lens of mortality, or thoughts of mortality. The way the seascapes enhance or blur the binary relationship of sea and sky--fluid and fluid, life and death. Feeding into this, almost ridiculously, thoughts from seeing The Ring 2 last weekend, and its view of the world of the dead as a place of water.
More haunting, though, were the cinemas. Sugimoto makes these images by exposing for the duration of the film, thus the screen becomes a sort of luminous, glowing monolith as the film on the screen burns into the film in the camera. Thus it is a light of simultaneity, everything happening at once. The photos achieve a sort of timelessness by way of flux. Time enbodied in timelessness, not unlike death, and the glowing fields of the cinema not unlike that last light we are reputed to travel towards as we leave this plane. Perhaps these photos do shed light on said light, perhaps it is the film of our lives projected simultaneously onto the screen of our dying minds, travelling to a realm where each thing is happening at once. The parcel of our lives viewed, at long last, from a distance.
