CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/2/2023

In Sugimoto's 'Time Machine,' the flicker of a second life

These days, as the widely-binged Netflix series The Crown brings the drama of the 1990s Royal Family back into the popular conversation, we couldn’t help but revisit this haunting 1999 “portrait” of Diana, Princess of Wales, from new release Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine. Published by Hatje Cantz to accompany the half-century retrospective currently on view at the Hayward Gallery, this comprehensive volume contains works from all the Japanese photographers enigmatic series, from the Dioramas, Theaters and Drive-Ins, to the Seascapes, Lightning Fields, the Portraits of wax figures and more. “When visiting the displays, we would never mistake the waxworks, however faithfully reproduced, for the real person,” Lara Strongman writes, “yet in Sugimoto’s photographs the camera has given them the flicker of a second life. The quality of stilled time bestowed on the figures by Sugimoto’s large-format camera in long exposures has re-established their historicity. We look, and look again to make sure we have understood what we have seen.… Perhaps in the absence of context and perspective the fake may be more readily mistaken for the real, but there’s more to it than that. Rather that the world is essentially an anachronous place, with everything that’s ever been thought and done by the people who came before us coexisting with everything else at once in order to have brought us here, to this moment.”