Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
OF ALL OF HIROSHI SUGIMOTO’S photographs, some 120 of which were recently on view in a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, I like best the blankest and emptiest of them, the seascapes and the movie screens. Paradoxically, these are also the least photographic of his photographs, at least as I understand the photographic: as a field of indexically registered, automatic detail, which tends toward a chaos principle of frozen momentariness and punctal oddity. There is none of that anywhere in Sugimoto’s work, but least of all in these flat seas and glowing