Gallery Koyanagi
Closes in 51 days
"Look at what I'm thinking," are the last words of the poem Jonathan Safran Foer wrote to accompany Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographs in the book "Joe." They could just as easily be a concise description of the artist's approach toward his art. One of the most philosophical of photographers, Sugimoto attempts to capture on film ideas that he arrives at long before he even has a camera in hand or a subject to point it at.
Currently at the Gallery Koyanagi (www.gallerykoyanagi.com) are photographs that he took in 2004 of Richard Serra's sculpture "Joe" at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, Miss. Like his other architectural series, the works look like soft charcoal drawings that explore negative space. Out of focus, they invoke both a sense of motion -- perhaps of creeping shadows -- and of space; what you are witnessing could be some otherworldly event. Though Sugimoto thinks photography can never capture our fleeting reality, with each of his projects he is getting closer to showing us what is just out of sight.
