A Postmodern Defamiliarization from Time in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Theaters”

Written by Rachel Barker, McGill University

Edited by Mathieu Lajoie

Introduction

As a static medium, photography inevitably grapples with the limitations of conceptual time; however, architectural photography specifically possesses the ability to manipulate a photograph's impression of time. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters series (1976-present) embodies a rich platform to assess architectural photography’s capacity to materialize imprints of time. Theaters presents the interior architecture of America’s glamorous and gaudy Art Deco cinemas from the 1920s and 1930s. Each image superimposes an entire feature film through exposure time matched with the film’s length. Sugimoto’s manipulation of linear time within a photograph reinforces key aspects of postmodern thought and provides a theoretical lens to contextualize his exploration of time exposed. Using Janet Tormey’s examination of the “Postmodern Megapolis,” I will expound on how Theaters reflects aspects of postmodern thought, specifically by blurring distinctions between the real and the unreal as they relate to linearity.[1] Applying Edward Soja’s work on hyperreality and simulacra theory, Theaters embodies postmodern dissonance through the artifice of nostalgia.[2] Finally, I contend that Sugimoto’s work reveals superficial aspects of both the Art Deco theatrical setting and the postmodern school of thought his method emulates. Theaters catalyzes nostalgia through the inaccuracies of memory, defamiliarizing viewers from linear time to exemplify the difficulty distinguishing the real from the imagined in a postmodern world where linearity is no longer absolute.

Part I: Disrupting Linearity

The photographic process behind Theaters superimposes layers of time through extended exposure times, which forms a postmodern image by combining real and unreal qualities. Sugimoto coined the term “time exposed” to describe how he harnesses the capacity of extended exposure to play with the sense of time a photo represents.[3] To fully grasp the magnitude of Sugimoto’s time exposed concept, one must understand his photographic process which uniquely collapses time. Riordan explains how Sugimoto used a large-format camera, exposing his negatives for several hours to “produce images with striking visual clarity…eliminating any perceptible grain” to achieve a meticulous photographic illusion.[4] Sugimoto programmed his camera’s exposure time to coincide with the film’s length, letting the shutter absorb the flood of frames per second in a blaze of white light.[5] The striking visual clarity resulting from this intensive process constructs photographs that “almost appear too detailed, sometimes becoming more lifelike than their profilmic objects.”[6] This photographic process allows for the illumination of architectural details that cannot be seen all at once during the real, in-person screening of the film. Thus Theaters enacts a collapse of time through duration, through the notion of time exposed. Looking at Akron Civic, Ohio (1980), this is not a snapshot, but an image of two hours (Fig. 1). To Soja, the postmodern urban imaginary cultivated a context in which people collectively realized “it had become more difficult than ever before to tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined.”[7] When taking into account Sugimoto’s photographic process, it becomes difficult to confront the fact that one gazes at two hours of exposure time. In Akron Civic, the rectangular aperture of light illuminates the theatre’s interior architecture; however, in experiencing the actual film in real life, only composite rays of light would reveal these details. Sugimoto’s images do not reflect the actual durational experience of a film within a cinema but compact the experience into a single static image which represents multiple points in time. This is postmodern in that Sugimoto’s image is fundamentally unreal. Humans cannot experience time in this manner. His time exposed fractures linear time, exemplifying the postmodern disassociation from an absolute reality in a world where reliably identifying fact from fiction became futile.[8] 

Figure 1. Hiroshi Sugimoto, Akron Civic, Ohio, 1980, gelatin silver print, the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

Theaters uniquely transcends the limitations posed by time on the medium of photography by instead becoming a representation of reality, or, as the postmodern thinker Baudrillard would view it, a simulation of the real.[9] Here, Roland Barthes’s seminal theorization on photography in his book Camera Lucida shows the dominant view of photography as a medium which permanently arrests its subjects within the past.[10] To Barthes, the photograph captures “an anterior future of which death is at stake,” and he mourns the “defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die.”[11] Likewise, Joel Smith discusses how architectural formations “embody durational time,” and “whatever a photograph represents, it represents time,” a moment that has passed.[12] However, Theaters evades these restrictions to the past because Sugimoto subverts the single click of the shutter which captures an image in a fraction of a second. Both Barthes and Smith understand photography through the duality of what has been, and what will be, but Sugimoto’s architectural photography denies this instant snapshot of time in favour of time as “both non-existent and circular.”[13] John Yau, a prolific scholar of the literature surrounding Sugimoto’s work supports the idea that Theaters suspends time. He argues Theaters formulates an “unattainable elsewhere, a beyond” that cannot be physically experienced.[14] Yau opposes Barthes’ idea of the photograph as an obliteration of the past and the future and instead argues “the viewer is halted in time” in a simultaneous past and future.[15] Yau’s argument can be applied to Baudrillard’s postmodern idea of simulation. To Baudrillard, the ability to differentiate between the real and imagined has become obsolete, completely effaced by “‘the precession of simulacra’” which replaces the real world with “simulated representations or images.”[16] Simulacra are representations of reality that not only precede truth but define it by presenting a glaze over reality when, to Baudrillard, there was never any absolute reality to begin with.[17] In Akron Civic, the actual image of the theatre is a simulacrum–a representation–of a ‘real’ space. However, it can be read as a simulation of the experience of viewing a film through Sugimoto’s durational exposure, opening up dimensions of the representative time photography condenses. 

Part II: Against the Decisive Moment

Now looking at Metropolitan L.A, Los Angeles (1993), the image suspends time in a denial of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment through Sugimoto’s durational filmic subject, and this mirrors postmodern simulation by depicting a film, a copy of an original copy of reality (fig. 2).[18] Thomas Kellein poetically explains how the architectural forms of Metropolitan L.A combine the immediate (the film screen in front of the camera) with the transcendental (the ‘gateway’ of white light), “in a way that appears simultaneously credible and surreal.”[19] The white rectangle of light “obliterates the stream of images and captures in a blaze of light the whole time factor of moviegoing.”[20] Sugimoto creates a copy of the film’s original representation of reality, perpetuating the simulation of reality and blurring the imagined from the real. By capturing the entire ‘time factor of moviegoing’ in a single blaze of light, the image of layered times exposed over the film’s duration contradicts Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment. Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment “popularised the notion that the best photographs are made by the patient and gifted photographer who captures a fleeting moment with just one click of the shutter.”[21] He praised photography “hinged on the split instant,”[22] similar to how Barthes thought the photograph’s instantaneous action “immobilizes a rapid scene in its decisive instant.”[23] Sugimoto undeniably transgresses this emphasis on the instant by capturing a duration of time. Metropolitan L.A. synthesizes the impact of the film’s original copy of reality, and to Baudrillard, such photographic reproduction “provides the means for endless series, copy and fabrication (simulacra).”[24] Metropolitan L.A. is fundamentally postmodern by acting as a simulacrum of a film (which is a simulacrum of the external world) and this subverts photography’s otherwise limitation to the decisive moment or instant.

Figure 2. Hiroshi Sugimoto, Metropolitan L.A., Los Angeles, 1993, gelatin silver print, private collection.

Theaters embodies the postmodern concept of hyperreality through the presence of overlapping speeds, disrupting the ability to distinguish linear time. Soja explains how hyperreality conceptualizes the confusion and fusion between the real and the imagined in the postmodern world, and further illuminates how the prefix “hyper–” connotes speed.[25] Norman Bryson explains how Sugimoto’s photography resists the twentieth century’s dominant temporal form of photography which aims to capture “the point in time, the world captured in an instant of unfolding,” and as a result, the “duration and continuity” of Theaters denies the decisive moment’s instant of unfolding.[26] Certainly, the decisive moment simplifies time through the instant. But when Sugimoto collapses time, he initiates a hyperreal image by disrupting the communication of speeds at play. In Metropolitan L.A., two contradictory speeds materialize. On one hand, there is the rapid “twenty-four-frames-per-second movement of the film” and on the other hand, the architectural surroundings establish a static, fixed time through “the object-world built to last,” in a state of permanence.[27] This is hyperreal by conflating different speeds of time, further reinforcing the inability to distinguish real, linear time. Sugimoto’s photography questions the potential lost in merely capturing the instant, and looks to the new opportunities presented when we open ourselves up to “other modes of time,” a time which is somehow “layered and multiple: there is not one speed to the world, but many, and they overlap in the same place.”[28] As viewers gaze upon the hyperreal contradicting speeds of the film screen and the comparatively static architecture of the theatre, Sugimoto further displaces a perception of linear time and highlights the capacity of photography and architecture to, in combination, dislocate linear time.

Part III: Activating Dissociative Nostalgia

Sugimoto’s Theater images initiate a sense of dissociation from concurrent time through the nostalgic interior architecture of the 1920s and 1930s American cinemas. Although the alluring dawn of cinema cultivated a desire for glamorous opulence, this lavish architectural style quickly fell out of fashion by the end of the 1930s. In Ohio Theatre, Columbus Ohio (1980), the decadent architectural framing overshadows the rectangle of light, undeniably exhibiting an architecture of past glamour (fig. 3). While similar theatres remain scattered across America, they represent a bygone era in American cinema when the consumption of film was concentrated, collective, and limited. These Art Deco cinemas imbue an inherent nostalgia as “palaces that reflected the illusions of grandeur peddled by Hollywood” from a time when “entertainment was still a communal activity and cinema vied with religion to capture America’s collective unconscious.”[29] Ohio Theatre’s lavishly layered curtains, intricate moulding, and various sculptures enclosing the screenspace convey a meticulous maximalism of the past. Modern architecture moved on from these Art Deco interiors just as the cinema gradually lost its preeminence in America’s collective unconscious. By taking the image in 1980, the realities of postmodernism cast Ohio Theatre’s obvious anterior past in a glamorous light, but the deceptive quality of nostalgia creates a confusing image operating on the intersection of the postmodern, and a deceitfully ideal past.  

Figure 3. Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ohio Theatre, Columbus Ohio, 1980, gelatin silver print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Returning to Akron Civic, the theatre’s interior architecture appears to emerge out of a black hole. The rays of light reflected by the projected screen cascade over the ornate balconies, stage, and seating area; however, they fail to reach the ceiling. This produces an architecture enveloped by blackness, dissociating the theatre from reality, as though Sugimoto captures a dream space conjured out of nonexistence. The camera angle places the viewer at eye level with the screen. We gaze at the screen, and the screen stares back. This effect creates a sense of floating harkening back to Yau’s idea of  an “unattainable elsewhere, a beyond.”[30] The lack of visible people contributes to the sense of this being a conceptual space, a dream space, as opposed to an inhabited one. Nostalgia enriches these effects, heightening the sensation of displacement by recalling an architecture of the past, further defamiliarizing viewers from the present.

Theaters intensifies the disjuncture between the memory of Art Deco architecture and its reality by showing a time before postmodernism–that is, through the myriad of ways Sugimoto exemplifies the postmodern gaze as described by Tormey and Soja. The resulting confusion reproduces the effects of the postmetropolis, a term used by Soja to describe postmodern urban environments where the impacts of “urbanization, global communication and late capitalist economies” heighten the confusion of contemporary living.[31] The postmetropolis formed in the wake of capitalism’s crisis of destruction which immediately manifested into rapid urban regeneration and socioeconomic developments in which “the real and imagined [were] persistently commingled.”[32] The turbulent urban growth of the postmetropolis swiftly moved away from past forms of modernism. Sugimoto’s Theaters precedes the postmetropolis environment by signifying a time before it, and perhaps the nostalgic quality of his images mourns the loss of an architecture untouched by the realities of the postmetropolis.

Concluding Remarks

Figure 4. Mike Hume, Auditorium from Balcony Left, 2017, colour photograph.

Thus, Theaters activates the postmodern nostalgia for these cinema houses reticent of a simpler time, but his lens reveals the superficiality between the idealization of the opulent Art Deco architecture and the superficiality driving the postmodern nostalgia for this bygone era of American cinema. Theaters illustrates “the precarious relation between memory and reality,” and in doing so, acknowledges the fracture dividing the two which the sumptuous deception of nostalgia often masks.[33] While Metropolitan L.A was taken in 1993, the geometric motifs on the ceiling and curvilinear arches framing the stage indicate the image originates seventy years prior. Sugimoto’s decision to use black and white photography further entrenches the image’s historical quality as well as the sense that it depicts a time before the dissonance of postmodernism. Although contemporary viewers did not experience Metropolitan L.A. in its 1920s prime, the nostalgia for this simpler, more elegant past beautifies the image while simultaneously exposing the disjuncture between memory and reality. Today, the Metropolitan L.A. Theatre (renamed the Orpheum Theatre) looks profoundly different (fig. 4). After significant renovations, the Theatre’s re-opening in the 2000s unveiled a new space with colourful stage lights, massive speakers, and changes to the original Art Deco ceiling and architecture.[34] The renovated theatre resembles a postmetropolis space through the discordant fusion of past and present in a space tied to both “the semblance of past histories, memories and places,” yet also a “distinctly local heritage…swamped by a globally shared culture.”[35] The renovation mixed the local heritage of the 1920s Hollywood cinema with the lights, speakers, and vibrant colours of theatres today. Therefore, in Metropolitan, L.A., the theatre’s untouched quality initiates nostalgia for a time before the chaos of postmodernism, yet there remains the tension in which he takes photos of Art Deco architecture in a postmodern way. This serves to expose the superficial quality of the opulent architecture of the 1920s, but also the superficiality of postmodernism which blurs reality by seeking reprieve in both nostalgia and consumerism. Both superficialities dislocate viewers today from a sense of linear time through the confusion between Theaters’ deception of a glamourized Art Deco past with the chaotic lens of dissonance postmodernism embraces.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters series eclipses photography’s limitation to the instant by superimposing layers of time, ultimately epitomizing aspects of postmodern thinking through the disintegration of both reality and linearity. The images draw upon the flaws of nostalgia and memory to picture a world before postmodernism; however, both the context of the original 1920s cinemas and Sugimoto’s postmodern context exhibit a sense of superficiality. Certainly, the cinematic subject is fitting. Films project actual superficial imitations of reality, and so do photographs, it appears.

Endnotes

[1] Janet Tormey, “Postmodern Megapolis,” in Cities and Photography (Taylor and Francis, 2013), 155-182.

[2] Edward Soja, “Chapter 11 Simcities: Restructuring the Urban Imaginary,” in Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 323-48.

[3] Thomas Kellein, “An Art that Teaches No Belief,” in Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Exposed, eds. Thomas Kellein, Christoph Grunenberg and Viola Grunder, trans. David Britt (Thames and Hudson, 1995), 13.

[4] Kevin Riordan, “Hiroshi Sugimoto and the Photography of Theatre.” Performance Research 20, no. 2 (2015): 102.

[5] Nancy Spector, “Reinventing Realism,” in Sugimoto Portraits, eds. Tracey Bashkoff and Nancy Spector (Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum, 2000), 14.

[6] Riordan, 102.

[7] Soja, 325.

[8] Soja, 324.

[9] Soja, 326-327.

[10] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, 1st American ed. (Hill and Wang, 1981), 96.

[11] Barthes, 96.

[12] Joel Smith, The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time, eds. Jill Guthrie and Sharon Herson (Princeton University Art Museum, 2011), 15.

[13] John Yau, “Time Halted: The Photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto.” The American Poetry Review 33, no. 5 (2004): 11. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20682669.

[14] Yau, 11.

[15] Yau, 11.

[16] Soja, 326.

[17] Soja, 327.

[18] Nadya Bair. “The Decisive Network: Producing Henri Cartier-Bresson at Mid-Century,” in History of Photography 40, no. 2 (2016): 146–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2016.1146445.

[19] Kellein, 13.

[20] Kellein, 13.

[21] Bair, 146.

[22] Bair, 148.

[23] Barthes, 31.

[24] Tormey, 160.

[25] Soja, 325.

[26] Norman Bryson, “Everything We Look at Is a Kind of Troy.” In Sugimoto Portraits, eds. Tracey Bashkoff and Nancy Spector (Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000) 54.

[27] Bryson, 4.

[28] Bryson, 54.

[29] Spector, 14.

[30] Yau, 11.

[31] Soja’s explanation in Tormey, 155.

[32] Soja’s explanation in Tormey, 157, 155.

[33] Marco De Michelia, “The Veiled Glance of the Memory.” In Sugimoto: Architecture, ed. Francesco Bonami (Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), 14.

[34] “Orpheum [Metropolitan] Theatre, Los Angeles,” Los Angeles - Historic Theatre Photography, March 2017, https://www.historictheatrephotos.com/Theatre/Orpheum-Los-Angeles.aspx.

[35] Tormey, 158, 157.