?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
SUGIMOTO, HIROSHI (1948- ) The magnificent portfolio "Time Exposed," with 50 plates, and including the frontispiece of the IBM Courtyard in Tokyo. Tri-tone offset lithographs, each 9 3/8x12 1/8 inches (23.8x30.8 cm.), tipped to mounts with the letterpress debossed title, date, and plate number on recto. Folio, brushed aluminum portfolio case; with the colophon pages which give the edition of 500; contents loose as issued. 1991
Hiroshi Sugimoto's sublime studies of seascapes are meditational, grand, and elusive. The horizon lines--some defined, some a hazy diffusion into the sky--are placed at the same plane in each image, creating a sense of seamless, transcendent sameness. Although the locations are debossed in the white mounts below each image (underlining Sugimoto's technical exactness), they are largely interchangeable. The photographs, made with a large-format camera and using a long exposure, are both meant to capture the passage of time and, it seems, to create a sense of timelessness and placelessness.
Many of Sugimoto's projects have used extended time as a component of the creation of the images, and his series are by extension a philosophical consideration of mortality. They document the world as it is (in this case the essential and life-giving resources water and air), but also reveal something of how the world feels without us, the viewer. Sugimoto said, "To me photography functions as a fossilization of time." In apparent opposition to our concept of photography as a record of a moment, Sugimoto's statement implies that the medium has the potential to also serve as a record of what is no longer present.
