Empire State Building

'Photography in itself has a very strange magical power and I wanted to investigate this particularly interesting aspect of photography the way we see things and the way the camera sees things. The camera in itself is a kind of duplicate visual mechanism. It works much the same way our eyesight does, only the camera is a machine and our eyes are mind operated. What I want to explore is how we can see things together with an artificial eye - how we can use the camera - to represents things in a unique way. Photography is a rather young medium and I don't think it has been entirely explored yet. I mean, for like a hundred years people were just amazed and surprised that this machine could capture the way we see the world - even better than painters. So people didn't think of it doing anything more. Now I think it's time for photography to re-surprise with what it can do. [] I have a scientific approach, I have to do a series of studies, tests and so forth. But I always come up with almost impossible ideas. For example, for the movie theaters I made a series of tests, and the idea was to get the entire exposure of the movie and see how it looked. I envisioned that the movie projected might burn out into an overexposure, gleaming white screen you know, like a religious experience, like Mother Mary making an appearance. Only ironically the intense light shining in the darkness is a Hollywood movie. That was my vision. The next step was, how do I make it happen? That's why I have to test out my ideas. I wake up with some impossible vision and try to make this vision happen. That is how I work'
(H. Sugimoto quoted in 'Conversation with Hiroshi Sugimoto' by Helena Tatay Huici, SUGIMOTO, exh. cat., Madrid, Fundacin "la Caixa", 1998, pp. 14 and 16).