Back when we were in Tokyo, Antoinette and I were lucky enough to see the first retrospective of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work at the Mori Gallery in Roppongi Hills.

Sugimoto’s photography goes beyond the documentation aspect of most photography and explores the limits and methods inherent in the photographic process. In his series “Theaters”, for example, the shutter is opened at the beginning of the film and closed at when it is over. The resulting image is of a bright white square in the centre of the frame, a feature length film captured in one frame.

In the “Dioramas” sequence, the simple fact that a photograph uses a single viewpoint for a lense - unlike us humans that have two eyes - is used to bring an eerie sense of reality to the dioramas at American Museum of Natural History.

The most powerful set of photographs in the exhibition was the “Conceptual Forms” photographs of plaster models of mathematical algorithms. Simply framed and lit, they reveal the beauty and complexity of the trigonometric equations.

“Helicoid: Minimal surface”

These stereometric models are made by pre-computer age machines, originating in Germany in the late 19th/early 20th Century and their restrained elegance pleases me far more than the latest computational explorations.

“Kuen’s surface: a surface with constant negative curvature”

Sugimoto:

“The mathematical models are sculptural renderings of trigonmetric functions; the mechanical models were teaching aids for showing the dynamics of Industrial Revolution-age Machinery. Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions.”

“Diagonal Clebish surface, cubic with 27 lines”