Year: 1977
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: 41.9 x 54 cm (16 1/2 x 21 1/4 in.)
Edition: No.15 of 25
Acquired from PHILLIPS, 2022
One of the pieces from “Theaters” series by Hiroshi Sugimoto. In photography, the longer the film is exposed, the brighter the photo gets. This artwork is a photograph taken inside a movie theater, as the title suggests. However, no movie is projected on the screen, which is the most important element. The appearance of just a white screen brightly floating in the darkness is completely different from the movie theaters that we know. For the “Theaters” series, Sugimoto visited movie theaters all around the world and took a picture by leaving the shutter open from the beginning until the end of an entire movie. The scenes of the whole movie that lasted a few hours are all condensed and projected as a mass of light. As photographs are not video images and by nature, they only capture a very moment of the world, it is difficult to record time. Sugimoto has managed to capture both “movie theater=space” and “movie=light” in a single picture. It looks extremely static at first sight, in fact, it is a terrifyingly dynamic movie-like photograph.
