Hiroshi Sugimoto - Taking up the melody

The book Taking up the Melody, which accompanies the eponymous exhibition, explores Sugimoto’s work through the concept of honka-dori, borrowed from classical Japanese poetry, which refers to the act of revisiting a previous work in order to shift its meaning and revitalize its significance. This principle of reworking allows Sugimoto’s entire body of work to be viewed as a system of variations, where each image is constructed in a conscious relationship to preexisting forms and knowledge: the accumulation of time until the image fades (in the “Theaters” series), the reduction of the landscape to an abstract and ahistorical structure (in the seascapes of “Seascapes”), and the exploration of optical phenomena and the limits of vision (“Opticks”).

Cover for Hiroshi Sugimoto - Taking up the melody

Photographs
Hiroshi Sugimoto

Texts

• Maud Marron-Wojewodzki, Heritage Curator,
  Director of the Soulages Museum in Rodez
• Céline Flécheux,
  Professor of Aesthetics at Paris 8 University

Courtesy of Atelier EXB