hiroshi sugimoto

i have always found hiroshi sugimoto's work to be visually arresting; there is something very beautiful in both the technical precision and luminosity to his photographs. in this sense, i found his work to be very accessible on a superficial level, even before i became interested in notions of time and history in relation to photographing. now, sugimoto's work has taken on a whole different meaning - his long exposures of burning candles and entire movies aggregated within one frame conceptually fits in perfectly with what i want my thesis work to address.

in my previous post, i spoke of my skepticism regarding Henri Cartier-Bresson's concept of the decisive moment. certainly there is a certain poetic quality to the idea of patiently waiting for disparate components of the world to momentarily align - but how realistic or "truthful" is it? certainly the definition of both 'decisive' and 'moment' varies greatly from one photographer to the next, from one eye to the next. this difference in aesthetic opinion is invariably unavoidable - and if this is the case, how does this challenge the idea of photographic truth?

my ideas regarding the idea about the decisive moment were still rather ill-defined, until yesterday when i serendipitously stumbled upon an essay about sugimoto. within it, curator David Elliott comments on Sugimoto's process in a way that sums things up perfectly:

"If the moment is indecisive - and the whole history and criticism of photography have been built upon the idea of the perfect shot - of what is time them made? And where does that leave photography? I am convinced that, deep down, Sugimoto distrusts the moment; it is far too flightly to be reliable enough to make art."

- David Elliott, "Hiroshi Sugimoto: the Face of Infinity"