Hiroshi Sugimoto. Opera House, a selection for Bergamo

Hiroshi Sugimoto is a highly versatile artist, garnering acclaim over the years not only as a photographer but also as an architect and designer. He has investigated various artistic disciplines, including theatre and cinema, from a very early age. In the mid-1970s, he wondered if he might be able to capture the entire sequence of frames in a film and concentrate them in a single photographic shot. His idea was to compress time and the fictional reality of the film into just one frame, creating an explosion of brilliant white light when reproduced on paper.

From 1978 to 2001 Sugimoto photographed American theatres dating from the 1930s and 1940s, one after the other, as well as more architecturally sophisticated ones of the 1950s, setting up a screen on the stage, when necessary, on which he projected a film. Over the following years, his artistic research also included America’s traditional drive-in open-air cinemas.

The Theaters collection of pictures, now renamed Opera House, started up again in 2013 after Sugimoto carried out a series of inspections of European theatres. His attention, which focused in particular on northern and central Italy from 2013 to 2016, led to a new series of photographs of theatres in both major cities and little towns out in the provinces. In some cases, we see not only a frontal view of the stage and screen, but also a view of the stalls and the gallery above.

In Opera House, the interaction between photographer and subject, spectator and work, is governed by a sense of time A time that appears to be suspended, drowned in the white of the screen at the centre of the image, a dazzling white in which the narrative of the film unfurls. An explosion of light that fires the imagination, while also lighting up the skeleton of an empty theatre, with no one there. Not so much a representation as a vision, for the flow of frames becomes a projection of passing time, in which we can all invent our own story.