A Blank Image. Perception and Time in Hiroshi Sugimoto's Photograhy

Hiroshi Sugimoto's work spans more than four decades, and the Japanese artist has become one of the most acclaimed creators of his generation. His artistic practice is based on notions of time, memory and the transitory. In this text we will examine the Theaters and Seascapes series, two of the artist's most celebrated projects, in which Sugimoto offers a visual record of duration. With a conceptual approach and through a patient methodology, based on long exposure times and a meticulous analogy development process, Sugimoto raises radical questions about the time-photography binomial. In this text we will analyse how the slowing down strategies proposed by Sugimoto alter our perception and temporal experience. In order to do so, we will analyse the links between his work and the theories about Slow Art, an artistic category proposed by Arden Reed, and, with the help of Juan Martin Prada, we will approach Sugimoto's photography as an example of counter-image to show that his photography offers a distilled opportunity for contemplation and perceptual rest: an image-time.