Naming things has something to do with human awareness, with the separation of the entire world from you. So with the Seascapes, I was thinking about the most ancient of human impressions. The time when man first named the world around him…
—Hiroshi Sugimoto
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce "7 Days / 7 Nights," an exhibition of fourteen photographs from the Seascapes series by Hiroshi Sugimoto in an architectural setting of his own design.
For more than thirty years, Sugimoto has produced series of highly refined black and white photographs. His subjects, which include movie theaters and drive-ins, natural history dioramas, waxworks, and seascapes, provoke fundamental questions about the relationship of photography and time while exploring the mysterious and ineffable nature of reality.
In 1980 he began working on an ongoing series of photographs of the sea and its horizon in locations all over the world, using an old-fashioned large-format camera to make exposures of varying duration. These seascapes are as much about the nature of photography as nature itself. They fall into several basic types: clear dayscapes with crisp, absolute horizons dividing bright, blank skies from dark water; foggy dayscapes where sky and sea merge atmospherically; nightscapes, in which sky, water, waves, and horizon register as so many degrees of black; and dawnscapes shot deliberately out of focus, where sunpaths spill from misty horizons, rendering the candor of photographic vision as pure impressionism. Captions are nuggets of empirical information and the nomenclature in Sugimoto's titles resonates: strait, gulf, bay, ocean, sea, channel, lake; Atami, Santa Cesarea, Pilion, Sounion, Tearai, Weston Cliff, Eagle River.
