Me, electrified

A great day, starting with breakfast with Tivoli and our mum.

Tivoli headed home and I finally got to the Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, after studiously avoiding reviews for three months. The very first picture, early human ancestors in a landscape, was one of several dioramas which set the tone for the rest of the very varied exhibition for me: 'it looks real, what is going on?'

The exhibition was a retrospective of 50 years of work, containing several very different series of photographs. I loved the next: a series of theatres, some in use and some derelict, illuminated only by the film that Sugimoto had arranged to have projected, with his camera shutter left open for the length of the film.

I loved his pictures of well-known buildings deliberately out of focus.

I really loved the photos of mathematical forms, with the formula of the form given in the information next to the picture.

I quite liked the seas.

I was less enthused the Buddhist temple and the Opticks and I really didn't like the chamber of horrors.

But I absolutely loved the 'Lightning Fields' series, for which Sugimoto used a 400,000 volt Van De Graaff generator 'to apply an electrical charge directly onto film, producing an image of an electrical current'. For this picture he made 'seawater' using rock salt, submerged electrically charged photographic paper into it, then watched 'light particles move across the surface like micro-organisms'. I was so entranced I stuck myself into the picture.

Here's one of the reviews I read after I came out.

I then treated myself to an amble with my camera. There are a few extras to show for it.


Black and white in colour 280