When Hiroshi Sugimoto was finding his photographic voice in 1976, he had what he described as a “waking dream”: he envisaged images of a movie theatre with a pure white screen. He made it reality from the back of a New York cinema, setting the exposure time on his large format film camera to match that of the film he was seeing.
A darkroom epiphany followed: the image, in which the ghostly white rectangle hovered amid the dark auditorium, was not something that existed in reality, and did not correspond to the pictures he’d seen spooling through the projector. “So who had seen it then?,” Sugimoto asked himself. “The answer is: it is what the camera saw.”
