Lake Superior, Cascade River

Sugimoto Seascapes at the Hayward Gallery

I wrote about Hiroshi Sugimoto's seascape photographs here in 2007, referring to some online images at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum. Checking back just now I found the link was dead, but there is still information on the exhibition at their website. I would love to visit the actual building in Washington one day - not only did they do that major career retrospective, they have also more recently commissioned Sugimoto (who is also an architect) to redesign their lobby and renovate their sculpture garden. This autumn though, at long last, a British gallery has put on a Sugimoto retrospective and it's just a 341 bus ride away from our home. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine includes the photograph I mentioned sixteen years ago, Boden Sea, Uttwil (1993), along with others just as beautiful. 

These luminous images, made with an old large-format camera, are referred to by the artist as seascapes, although Boden Sea is what Sugimoto calls Bodensee, i.e. Lake Constance, and my photo below shows another lake view. But The Guardian exhibition review begins with a wonderful view of the North Atlantic Ocean and the Evening Standard's includes Sugimoto's photograph of the Bay of Sagami. I will briefly quote Laura Cummings' article, as she manages to include the lovely word for a cold sea fog, 'haar'.

These monochrome photographs must all be captured at a particular moment, by their very nature, and yet they appear to stand outside time. Their poetry lies in more than they show. [They] hover between representation and abstraction. There are visions of shining light where up and down appear inscrutable, seas that tip over the horizon, or resemble nothing but haar. There are seas that register as oblongs of graphite shading. All are real – look closely and you can even distinguish tidal flow – but as intangible as outer space.

 

Lake Superior, Cascade River, 1995

Sugimoto's photographs allow you to imagine a primal sea untouched by humanity. In my book Frozen Air I described looking out on the English Channel, which Sugimoto has photographed for this series from both shores. There can be passages of time when no ships cross your field of vision, and nothing but light and water lie in front of you. In Marcel Proust's first book, Pleasures and Days, he described this pristine vision: ‘unlike the earth, the sea does not bear the traces of human works and human life. Nothing remains on the sea, nothing passes there except in flight, and how quickly the wake of a ship disappears! Hence the sea's great purity, which earthly things do not have.'

Wave Movements

Billboard poster advertising Mountains and Waves, Highbury, April 2015

We were at the Barbican on Sunday for the last concert in a weekend of new music entitled 'Mountains and Waves'.  The first half was a premiere of Wave Movements by Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire and Bryce Dessner of The National (see the clip embedded below).  This was 'composed directly to the actual rhythms of waves' and began with rising and falling sounds reminiscent of breakers arriving and departing.  It was pleasant enough but after a while I started hoping for more of the drama and beauty you hear in the great sea compositions (Debussy, Sibelius, Britten), or to hear something more surprising than swelling violins and the rumble of kettle drums.  The ending was rather surprising - Maddy Pryor, once of Steeleye Span, came on and sang what sounded like a sea-themed folk song (her voice was half drowned by the surging strings).  Having read that the performance would feature Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes I had expected something quieter and more minimal.  Hung in a gallery setting, his images radiate silence and mystery, their skies empty, their grey seas stilled by the camera.  Perhaps we try too hard to project music on natural processes.  It was almost easier to sense 'wave movements' in the second part of the concert, listening to So Percussion perform Steve Reich's Drumming (1971).  I could imagine something sounding like this inspired by the uneven phasing of waves striking a rocky coastline.  Drumming was composed under the influence of West African polyrhythms and Reich later recalled the impact of studying percussion in Accra with the Ghana Dance Ensemble: 'I was overwhelmed by their music, like being in front of a tidal wave.'

Boden Sea, Uttwil

There is a nice exhibition of Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs at the Hirshhorn Museum site. Here is how he introduces some of his seascapes: "One New York night in 1980, during another of my internal question-and-answer sessions, I asked myself, "Can someone today view a scene just as primitive man might have?" The images that came to mind were of Mount Fuji and the Nachi Waterfall in ages past. A hundred thousand or a million years ago would Mount Fuji have looked so very different than it does today? I pictured two great mountains; one, today's Mount Fuji, and the other, Mount Hakone in the days before its summit collapsed, creating the Ashinoko crater lake. When hiking up from the foothills of Hakone, one would see a second freestanding peak as tall as Mount Fuji. Two rivals in height—what a magnificent sight that must have been! Unfortunately, the topography has changed. Although the land is forever changing its form, the sea, I thought, is immutable. Thus began my travels back through time to the ancient seas of the world."

"Immutable", but never the same... as you look at the different seas you wonder if he has captured essential differences in them - the hazy shimmer of Boden Sea, Uttwil (1993), the firm horizon of Tyrrhenian Sea, Conca (1994) or whether in different atmospheric conditions these images could be reversed.

In an interview here Sugimoto says: "The first portfolio of seascapes I published was entitled 'Time Exposed' because time is revealed in the sea.... People have a lot of strange ideas about my seascapes - they think these photographs were done using very long exposures, but they are in fact very fast because I wanted to stop the motion of the waves, which are constantly moving. You heard I took some photographs using a camera speed of zero ASA? That's impossible."

Postscript 2015:
I was wondering if it might be possible to include a fair use / non-copyright image with this now and I see that since I wrote this post the photograph Boden Sea, Uttwil has been used for two album covers.  The first, below, was Specification.fifteen (2006) by Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree.  Three years later U2 used the same image for No Line on the Horizon.

Mountains of the Mind

Oslo's National Museum is organised very well on thematic grounds. There was a lot of criticism when Tate Modern opened with a Richard Long right opposite a Monet, and to some extent I agreed that this tended to diminish both works, but the idea of juxtaposing responses to landscape from different eras is something that I do enjoy (as should be evident from this web log). In Oslo there is an excellent room with striking contemporary works like Marianne Heske's Mountains of the Mind (1988), Per Bernsten's View No. 4, Eggedal 1985 and Hiroshi Sugimoto's Norwegian Sea, Veseralen (1990), placed among nineteenth century Norwegian landscape paintings. Among the latter are Kitty Kielland's beautiful Summer Night (1886), a small Friedrich-like painting by Thomas Fearnley, Old Birch at the Sognefjord (1839), and Johan Christian Dahl's vast and detailed, View from Stalheim over Naerodalen (1842), parts of which are like a hyperreal Chinese mountain landscape.

Johan Christian Dahl, View from Stalheim over Naerodalen (1842)
Source: Wikipedia Commons

I bought a postcard of the Marianne Heske work, a video image of a mountain scene with what appear to be heat-sensitive colours. I can't find the exact image on line but there is a similar one here and a different video image here. Another example in a similar style is Full Moon Mountain (1987). I had not encountered Heske's work before. It says here that Heske created "canvases made up of enlargements of video photograms which had registered the emergence of lava in a volcanic eruption" - I am not sure if this is a reference to Mountains of the Mind? Visually Heske's work brought to mind the more extreme Symbolist and Expressionist landscape paintings - the design of the National Museum invites such comparisons.