Hiroshi Sugimoto's New Photographs

Hiroshi Sugimoto's Lightning Fields
@ the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Lightning Fields, #s 13, 11, 128

I mentioned in an earlier post how nice the show announcements are that come from Rose Gallery of Santa Monica. Turns out it may be a West coast thing because the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco also creates well-designed show announcements with interesting typography, graphic use of the photographs and heft as an object. Plus, they're even bigger than the ones from Rose Gallery. In the work space of the gallery they have many of them framed as posters.

Sugimoto self-portrait

The show this piece is announcing is of new work by Hiroshi Sugimoto called Lightning Fields. Each image is a unique document of an electrical current. Sugimoto uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto his film. And they are wonderful. And the announcement is wonderful too. (Pardon the crimps...Post Office may be the best in the world but it still manages to mangle the one thing you don't want mangled.)

Stiff card, 16 x 20 inches,
folded twice to produce an 8 x 10 announcement
that unfolds into a poster

Front

Back

Opened once

Fully opened

You can find some very interesting video on YouTube of Sugimoto talking about his work. He's quite articulate. About 15 minutes total: Part 1 and Part 2.

Also, here's an article on Sugimoto and his new projects including the Lightning Fields as well as Sugimoto's reprinting of some of Fox Talbot's negatives. It originally ran in Modern Painters magazine but is of course now online.