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.
