Cardboard slipcase

The first Hiroshi Sugimoto book that I have chosen to review is arguably his least accessible or most inscrutable. In Praise of Shadows is a slim volume containing twenty photographs of a candle burning, printed on clear acetate. For each photograph, a candle was placed in a dark, draughty room, and a single exposure was taken over several hours as the wick burned from top to base, reducing the candle to nothing. Each photograph in the spiral bound book is interleaved with with a sheet of bright white card, the reader is invited to recreate the shadows from these fossilised candles.

Front cover

The title is taken from Junichiro Tanikazi's 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics, "In Praise of Shadows". This essay has become something of a manifesto for generations of Japanese artists. Tanizaki says that the Japanese "find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates."

Sugimoto works on vast projects, each concerned with photographing the essence of time. He coined the phrase "Time Exposed" to describe his work. In his most famous project he photographs film theatres over the course of a movie, the screens turn brilliant white and illuminate the theatre. With his Seascape series he photographs the eternal sea, each frame bisected by the horizon. In Praise of Shadows is built on an intimate concept, Sugimoto takes the elemental form of light - a naked flame - and records it etching through time.

Acetate sheet shown between white card separators

As with most of Sugimoto's work, and in tune with his conceptualist and minimalist roots, there are endless cycles and layers. The work does not stop with the photographs. In Praise of Shadows is also an installation piece which I was fortunate enough to experience at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2003. In a dark room a candle was placed several feet off the ground. Level with the candle and several feet in front of it one of the direct positives from In Praise of Shadows was suspended. The light from the flickering candle passed through the acetate, casting a shadow on the wall and resurrecting the spent candle. The line between photography and reality becomes blurred. Each morning the museum curator lit a new candle. This is the infinite, the respect for eternity, that pervades all of Hiroshi Sugimoto's work. A photograph of such an installation is included at the back of the book inside a double page gatefold.

If Sugimoto's work is sometimes interpreted as elegiac, Tanizaki's essay is explicit in its lamentation of the Western influence on Japanese aesthetics. Tanazaki says that "in the photographic image itself … there somehow emerges differences in the national character. If this is true even when identical equipment, chemicals, and film are used, how much better our own photographic technology might have suited" Japanese aesthetics. Here he is considering an alternative history where the Japanese rather than Europeans or Americans discovered photography and invented the technology around it. He speaks as if it is a lost cause in 1933. History has of course unfolded with Japan at the forefront of photographic technology. I am confident that Tanazaki would have approved of Sugimotos ouvre. His is contemporary art built on core traditional Japanese aesthetics and philosophy.

Much of Tanazaki's essay attempts to address why Western and Eastern opinion are often in conflict. "What produces such differences in taste? In my opinion it is this: we Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light - his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow".

However, one need not appreciate the intracacies of Japanese aesthetics to enjoy these images. "Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty", Tanazaki states. These feathery relics of candles have a primeval austerity to them. Who has not sat before a burning fire and stared wide eyed into the dancing flames? This act of meditation must have been practised by our ancestors for thousands of years before writing or even speech was invented. These photographs, or photograms, are those moments condensed. They have a grand stillness but also convey movement. There is a gentle poetry in such elemental images. As a book, the collection of photos becomes an object of art itself, a keepsake of memory, of time.

Sugimoto continues to question the essence of photography. Literally 'light-etching', photography as a concept predates the 'invention' of modern photography. In this series Sugimoto takes elemental light and lets it be absorbed by film with nothing between. Is there any purer expression of photography? Passing back through the aeons of time to the first expressions of art, we find hand imprints on cave walls. Surely illuminated by the licking flames of ancient fires, these first artists would have spat and rubbed carbon on those walls, rendering images not too unlike the ghostly images we study here. It is this unique ability to collapse time, history, memory, and form into art that makes Hiroshi Sugimoto one of the greatest living artists.

A fitting end to this sequence is an extended quote from Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows. He considers the colour of darkness. "I think of an unforgettable vision of darkness I once had … I was in a large room, the 'Pine Room' I think, since destroyed by fire, and the darkness, broken only by a few candles, was of a richness quite different from the darkness of a small room. … A candle stood on the far side of a large screen. On the far side of the screen, at the edge of the little circle of light, the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as from a black wall. I wonder if my readers know the color of that 'darkness seen by candlelight'. It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes."

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