The sea lies motionless, radiant as a mirror, beneath a voluminous night sky. It holds the same moonlight our ancestors once saw, thousands of years ago. Two horizontal expanses of glowing light and dark, this mesmerising photograph gives no hint of when or even where in this world we might be. It is concerned with the very opposite: the timeless sky, the unchanging ocean.
The great Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) is probably most famous for his long series of luminous seascapes, begun in 1980 and generally made at first or last light with an immense box camera set up on a cliff looking out to the horizon. In this case, according to the caption, he was off the north Atlantic coast. 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.
It is astonishing that the Hayward Gallery’s magnificent retrospective, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, is the artist’s first in Britain. For decades he has been taking celebrated pictures that make us think of the nature of picture-taking – seascapes, for instance, that 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.
During the processing, Sugimoto found that static electricity interfered with the results. Using a Van de Graaff generator to release electrical charges on to photosensitive paper, he began to reproduce this accident to his advantage. The Hayward has a gallery full of the subsequent Lightning Fields series.
Forked lightning hits the ground, or rises up like a standing tree, brilliant white against the night. It splinters into veins, in turn conjuring human X-rays, winter leaves or silver deposits. It flashes like flames or fireflies, which might be vast or in minute closeup, since there is no measure of scale. These split-second images describe both the action of electricity and the essence of photography: light captured and magically held.
The show opens with some of Sugimoto’s earliest and most bewildering photographs. These appear to show wolves in intimate groupings, or condors alighting on high mountain peaks. A polar bear looks down upon a dead seal, ice and freezing air stretching away into the whiteout.
How can Sugimoto be present? Where is the here of these photographs, and when? Logic says they cannot quite be real, and yet that is precisely what they seem. In fact the artist was taking large-format, long-exposure photographs of prehistoric dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He was picturing tableaux, effectively, while apparently bringing the taxidermied creatures back to life. Though the bear is now twice removed from its homeland, it seems to be released from time’s ice, returning to reality.
“There is no decisive moment in my photograph,” Sugimoto has said, “only the melting of time.” What would you see, for instance, if you captured a whole film in a single frame? Sugimoto has returned to this question over and again since the early 70s, each time in the poetic atmosphere of some abandoned cinema. He opens the camera’s aperture at the start of the movie and only closes it at the end. The screen turns into an oblong of pure incandescence, illuminating the more or less grand decay of the theatre around it.
People in the gallery look to see if the image is backlit on a lightbox; how else to explain the almost supernatural brightness? In one sense, the Hayward show is all ceaseless mystery and surprise. Take the gallery of portraits. Even if it is palpably obvious that you cannot be looking at a living Oscar Wilde, or an undead Henry VIII, kingly face like thunder, there is a momentary swither (as with practically everything Sugimoto makes) between illusion and reality.
Perhaps someone is acting the part of Diana, Princess of Wales for Sugimoto, in the manner of some Alison Jackson fake celebrity setup? This woman is so much more like Diana than any professional lookalike; and yet somehow not quite herself. Sugimoto is in fact photographing her waxwork, in such voluminous shadow, and with such glamorous lighting, that she appears to be right there before us. There are no real people in his photographs.
Sugimoto has written of learning how to see the world as the camera does. But of course it can only record what he himself selects – seas and skies, dawn and electricity, even the colour of light itself, in a very moving late gallery, where the images seem to slip the bonds of Earth for the high empyrean.
Most captivating of all are the photographs where the camera seems to be drifting somewhere in the air, as if in a dream. The Seagram Building becomes a grey ghost at dusk. The sea is a silver continuum. The pinnacle of the Chrysler Building is recognisably itself, yet so sequined and twinkling in the light of another sun it seems to exist in some other era.
This is a beautiful, enthralling and meditative show, the atmosphere at the Hayward gently transfixed, audiences quietly talking. Wonder is at the heart of it: a wonder at nature, man and creature, all through time, but also at the strangeness of photography itself. For these are pictures of what photographs may also be – the half-caught memory, the ghost in the machine, the shadow in time’s eye.
Philosophers speak of the metaphysical in Sugimoto’s art and that seems apt. Some of his images make truth out of fiction through the camera’s seal of authenticity; others unmoor our sense of place and time. Records made in and of time, these images nonetheless float free of their given moment, showing us what the world looked like before we existed, as it seems, and perhaps even what it will look like when we are no longer there.
• Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is at the Hayward Gallery, London, until 7 January
