The latest in Damiani and MW Editions' Sugimoto project collects his
majestic images of classic modernist buildings
In 1997, Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) began a series of photographs of
significant works of modernist architecture, intending "to trace the
beginnings of our age via architecture." One of the hallmarks of
Sugimoto's work is his technical mastery of the medium. He makes
photographs exclusively with an 8 x 10" view camera, and his silver
gelatin prints are renowned for their tonal range, total lack of grain,
wealth of detail and overall optical precision. In making the
Architecture photographs, however, he inverted his usual process:
"Pushing out my old large-format camera's focal length to twice-infinity
... I discovered that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of
blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testing architecture for
durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the
process."
In this volume, which includes 19 previously unpublished images, the
language of architectural modernism is distilled in photographs of Le
Corbusier's Villa Savoye, Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building and Frank
Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao. By virtue of their blurriness and lack of
color, the images strip down buildings to their essence, what we might
imagine was the architect's first, pure vision of form. The details of
construction and imperfections that are a natural result of a massive,
collaborative human undertaking are absent, and instead light and shadow
define the forms of these buildings. The Architecture photographs
continue the artist's longstanding investigations of the passage of time
and history. Are these monuments to human ingenuity and the power of the
industrial age as eternal as they seem?
