Hiroshi Sugimoto: Past Tense

“Hiroshi Sugimoto: Past Tense,” an exhibition on view at the Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, brings together three of Sugimoto’s most significant series: “Dioramas,” “Portraits,” and “Photogenic Drawings.” For “Dioramas,” which he started in the mid-seventies, Sugimoto shot the animal tableaux at the American Museum of Natural History, producing what look like realistic wildlife photographs. “Wax Portraits,” from 1999, is a series of nine-minute-long exposures of wax figures that were sculpted from painted portraits. (The wax figure of Henry VIII, for example, is based on a portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger.) In 2007, for “Photogenic Drawings,” Sugimoto began photographing nineteenth-century photogenic-drawing negatives by William Henry Fox Talbot.

Each of these series reflects Sugimoto’s conviction that, as he once told an interviewer, “A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world.” Photography, he says, is “a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time.”

All photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto.