Radio City Music Hall 1978

Hiroshi Sugimoto made this photograph of Radio City Music Hall using a large format camera and a prolonged exposure time. It’s so interesting, how he has managed to distill this grand space down to simple contrasts of dark and light, which makes you wonder about the process. The surface of the photograph has a tactile quality, doesn't it? You can almost feel the textures of the theater’s interior, from the plush seats to the ornate ceiling. The screen is like a void, a glowing rectangle that disrupts the symmetry of the composition. This bright, white void sucks all the detail away from the space, but equally the space is composed to worship it. Sugimoto’s use of black and white reminds me of the paintings of Gerhard Richter, who also explored the medium of photography to create blurry, dreamlike images that challenge our perception of reality. Like Richter, Sugimoto invites us to question the nature of representation and the relationship between the image and the real world.