Hiroshi Sugimoto and the Overcoming of Tautology

Today I'd like to take a look at the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto through the lens of a recent Artforum review by Carol Armstrong, professor of art at Princeton University. Before reading on, take a look at some of his work at the Robert Klein Gallery website. Rather interesting, if you ask me. But let's ask Professor Armstrong instead:

"These photographs do not freeze the living moment or capture life; like mummies, they are monuments to the already dead and to the eternity of death. Manatee, 1999, is a beautiful photograph, but the most living thing in it is the light that streams through glass and embalmed water onto silver emulsion. The manatees it depicts may be "real," as Sugimoto asserts, but the reality they materialize is not that of life, for they appear never to have been alive in the first place. Theirs is not the "that-has-been" of past livingness or the future anteriority of death about which Barthes wrote so poignantly. Theirs is rather the evermore of the always-was, the eternal presentness of the tomb that is shared by painted portraits and stone sculptures alike. The materiality of Sugimoto's photographs is very evidently photographic, yet in the matter of time, they have no specificity of medium."

I admit that my reaction to this photograph before reading these words had been somewhat different. I had taken the manatees to be in a state of stasis, but one within time, a liminal time, however, drawn toward the surface of the eternal through the immaterial illumination of an otherworldly sun. I must thank Professor Armstrong for correcting this impression, based, as it was, upon an unfamiliarity with Sugimoto's work. I had mistakenly assumed that the manatees were poised directly between their past livingness and the future anteriority of a death that, like the sun in the photograph, stands beyond the world they'd come to know. A novice in matters Sugimoto, I had failed to take account of the following considerations:

"Why do I like the sublime seas and the snow-white screens so much? Well, precisely because they are so very perverse in their feats of photographic unfeasibility. Which is to say, not because they are so very beautiful, which they are, and not because they were so very hard to do, which they were, but because their emptying photography of the photographic is so very contrary in the way it ends up showing what makes a photograph a photograph."

None of this had occured to me, I must hesitantly admit. I dare say I'd considered them within the boundaries of photographic feasability. Furthermore, I had entirely failed to notice that they had emptied photography of the photographic, a point which one must surely understand in order to perceive that the temporal character of those manatees exhibited the evermore of the always-was. If I had never had the great fortune to stumble across this analysis, I may never have been compelled to reconsider what does make a photograph a photograph.

If you recall my earlier discussion about a possible hierarchy of the arts, I must add that my friend had placed photography as the lowest of the static visual arts, calling it the most passive, propagandistic, and superficial of all. I think an artist such as Sugimoto reveals the error in these arguments as he has clearly gone beyond some kind of mere point-and-click. His photographs are certainly compositions in every sense of the word and serve to challenge the sharp distinction between photography and painting. After reading Professor Armstrong's review, however, I have also been led to wonder whether they do not also challenge the internal line between photography and photography. In dividing temporality between past and future on the one hand and the evermore of the always-was on the other, do they not also point to a dissolution of the tautology "photography is photography"? Do they not call into question all statements of identity?