John Yau
Time Halted: The
Photographs
I.
IN CAMERA LUCIDA, ROLAND BARTHES' REFLEC
tion on the relationship between photography
and mortality, the author writes:
In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate
Secretary of State W. H. Seward. Alexander Gard
ner photographed him inhis cell,where he iswait
ing to be hanged. The photograph is handsome,
as is the boy: that is the st?dium. But the punc
tum is: he isgoing to die. I read at the same time:
This will he and This has been. Iobserve with hor
roran anterior future ofwhich death is the stake.
By givingme the absolute past of the pose (aorist),
the photograph tellsme death inthe future.What
pricksme is the discovery of this equivalence. In
frontof the photograph of my mother as a child,
I tellmyself: she is going to die. I shudder, like
Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe
which has already happened. Whether or not the
subject is already dead, every photograph is this
catastrophe.1
For Barthes, the catastrophe is unavoidable because
time obliterates the punctum, or small space, regis
tered in the photograph. The image is evidence of
that which no longer exists, because nothing can
survive exactly as it is themoment the photograph
is taken. Barthes believes that time's passing is lin
ear, that it is an inescapable force pulling both
everything and everyone toward chaos and dissolu
tion. Thus, a photograph is able tomomentarily sus
pend time, but realityeventually subsumes the photo
or whoever occupies it.
graph's space and whatever
This understanding of time's passing is a familiar
one. Whether or not we believe that the author (or
self) is dead, we know thatmortality awaits us all.
We may choose to ignore this fact, but itdoes not
forgetus. Throughout Camera Lucida, Barthes moves
between two poles: This has been and This will be.
He believes that each photograph "always contains
the imperious sign of [his] future death."2 Ifwe ac
cept this part of the author's argument, the ques
tion that logically follows is this: is it possible to
redefine the This has been and the This will be of
photography, as well as liftthem out of linear time
into some other understanding of time? And if so,
what would the photographs be of?
The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto's recogni
tion of time is very different from Barthes'. For him,
time is both non-existent and circular. He under
stands that the bodies that one sees are temporary
havens, way stations that are only briefly occupied.
In his series Dioramas (1976) and Wax Museums
we see perfect corpses, bodies that have
(1994),
been vacated. One of the earliest ways Sugimoto
collapsed time was by his highly considered fram
ing of a remote source of light, thus making it
rather than what it illuminated the subject of our
attention.In his series Theaters (1976), he began
photographing the interiors ofmovie palaces, those
highly detailed cavernous structures built during
the 1920s and '30s. As with all of his subsequent
series, themovie palace interiors depend on care
fully preconceived limits. With his eight-by-ten
camera set up in the balcony, usually
during the
afternoon showing when the theater was nearly
empty, Sugimoto kept its shutters open for the
film's entire screening. The photograph's primary
light source is the film's duration.
The residue of the film's self-canceling passage
forms a radiant rectangle that is framed on all sides
by the theater's fantastic architecture. While his
2004 11
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
of Hiroshi
Sugimoto
U.A. WALKER, NEW YORK (1978)
deep affection for geometric compositions is evident
in a number of his series, and particularly in the
Theaters, Sugimoto doesn't impose a geometric
structure upon his subject matter. Rather, he re
inforces the geometry of certain situations. Echo
ing earlymodernist geometric abstraction, particu
larly the bracing severities of Kazimir Malevich,
Sugimoto's theater compositions consist of a
whitish rectangle locked within a blackish rectangle.
In most of the theater photographs, a darkened
proscenium arch and decorative architectural de
tails enclose a rectangle of dense, milky light.Often,
rows of empty seats are visible in the
foreground,
just below the glowing movie screen. Except for
the viewer, the auditorium is unoccupied.
From his precise securing of a glowing screen
within a darkened, highly detailed rectangle, to the
showing of a large empty hall, everything in the
theater photographs underscores that the viewer
is alone. In addition, because of the placement of
the screen, the viewer feels as ifhe or she is float
ing in a large, dimly litworld inwhich luminosity
is remote and inaccessible. The ornate architecture
frames the light as well as defines it as an unattain
able elsewhere, a beyond. In the distance, a glowing
an aperture filled with
rectangle, light, is encased
in an elegant structure. In registering a beyond that
cannot be physically experienced, Sugimoto brings
into play that which cannot be seen and remains
hidden, possibilities that few photographers have
explored with such rigor and delight.
By distancing, framing, and staging the light,
Sugimoto challenges Barthes' reading of the photo
as the embodiment of "This has been" and
graph
"This will be." In contrast to Barthes, who argued
that the photograph made him more acutely aware
of the separation of obliterated past and abolishing
future, Sugimoto uses the photograph to close the
gap between these two distinct states of conscious
ness. In Sugimoto's
photographs, the past hasn't
vanished and the future doesn't eradicate. Rather,
the viewer is floating in a world of halted time. This
doesn't mean that the images aremore comforting
than those that Barthes wrote about, because they
aren't. There is an inescapable chill to these black
and-white photographs, a a
feeling that this is
nether world without sunlight. Even the light ema
nating from themovie screen feels cold.
With the theater photographs, the viewer is left
to.ponder what exactly has been? And what exactly
will be? The st?dium is a concisely composed im
age of a movie screen, its rectangle of light illumi
nating its surroundings just enough for the viewer
to distinguish the details of the containing struc
ture. But what is itspunctum} Is it that the theater
inwhich the photograph was taken will no longer
A Column
exist one day? Is it that this light has already van
ished? Those views would have required very differ
ent kinds of photographs.
For Sugimoto, the elsewhere or beyond is a state
of consciousness that transcends the essence of
reality,which is time passing. Believing transcen
dence is impossible, he asks: why do we live in
time? And what might we learn from living in time
depends on how we understand its passing. What
is distinctive about Sugimoto's approach to these
universal interrogations is how he envisions time
itself. The theater photographs can be read as
an analogue for both the interior of a still camera
and thewomb. The radiant screen is the firstwave
of light flooding in through the camera's open
shutter, a birth canal of sorts. Both being born and
being reborn means one enters theworld of light.
Photographs presume
we have already entered the
world of light, rather than we have yet to enter it.
Thus, in the otherwise empty theater, the viewer
is the one perceiving object that the light has yet
to reach, the innocent child who has not entered
the world. Because we see the light as a remote
source, revelation forever eludes us, and the pres
ent becomes the beyond. It is hardly reassuring that
the light emanating from this beyond is cool and
inhuman.
In his first two series, Theaters (1976) and Dio
ramas (1976), Sugimoto established the ground
work for his investigations into the nature of light
and time. The recurring feature of all of his work
is that he has never used a camera to document a
moment in a living individual's life.Thus, his con
ceptually based work has nothing to do with Henri
Cartier-Bresson's advocacy of the "decisive moment"
or with Barthe's "punctum." Rather than register
ing an unrepeatable moment, he approaches pho
tography as something that is no longer bound by
the constraints of time and space thatwe have as
sumed are inherent to the camera. In effect,he has
freed the camera from itshistorical limitations, and
it can now document amoment that existed before
the discovery of photography. While a photograph
halts time, Sugimoto photographs time halted,
even if it is amoment that occurred many hundreds
of centuries ago, before the camera existed.
In his ongoing series Dioramas (1976), we see
hyperreal scenes of life the times of our
during
Earliest Human Relatives (1994), the Neanderthal
(1994) and Cro-Magnon (1994). In all three photo
graphs, the figures don't notice our presence. We
are bodiless
figures hovering just beyond the space
of their social interaction. InWhite Mantled Colobuss
(1994), a group of monkeys
living in the trees
define a self-contained, self-sustaining world that
Earliest Human Relatives (1994)
 never acknowledges our existence. We are invisible,
unthreatening visitors floating in the air, viewing
A Community of Writers a different species in their environment. We are
strangers in this world.
Three-year studio/research program a
Sugimoto has set the viewer adrift in world in
The features: which all epochs and eras are present. However,
three-year program

in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction

he has inverted the modernist impulse to access
Workshops the past, to inhabit itwith person?e. He is on the
courses inbook reviewing and travelwriting
Topics
opposite end of the spectrum from James Joyce,
Faculty/student ratio of 1:3 Pablo Picasso, and Ezra Pound, and the desire to
Excellent preparation in composition and recover what Guy Davenport rightly defines as the
creativewriting pedagogy "archaic." The world Sugimoto has been construct
to teach in the community and
Opportunities ing over the past three decades is not mythological.
study abroad Penelope is not waiting for us to arrive, and there
is no quest to be undertaken.
All MFA candidates: In contrast to the Theaters, which allude to the
Receive three years of full financial support camera, the Dioramas evoke the nature of the pho
Teach undergraduate workshops in theirgenres tograph. Replete with all the necessary details, dio
Take workshops in at least two genres ramas are carefully staged, three-dimensional

The write ratio. photographs. The

scenes are both complete and
Most candidates publish prior to graduation, and closed, and nothing can be added to, or subtracted
many have won national publication prizes.
MFA at Penn State from, them. While the Theaters focus on the per
For more information go to: ceiving consciousness in those moments just be
Prose faculty: fore the individual enters the world of light, the
http://english.la.psu.edu
William j. Cobb, Charlotte Holmes, Dioramas define the viewer as a ghost wandering
josip novakovich, and toby thompson a stranger looking at the history of
COLLEGE
through time,
O F E the world. Whereas, Barthes brackets a photo
Poetry faculty:
LIBERAL graph's existence between birth and death, Sugi
Robin Becker, C. s. Giscombe, and moto posits his as existing in the reality that pre
Julia Kasdorf (MFA director) ARTS cedes birth and follows after death.
In the Seascapes (1980), which he started nearly
Visitors: pennState twenty-five years ago, Sugimoto once again estab
A. Manette Ansay, Alison Hawthorne Deming, jgjjjj
liUj lishes a compositional structure that evokes geo
Evan Eisenberg, John Elder, Kamau Brathwaite,
metric painting, in this case the late paintings of
Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Susan Howe, Yusef Penn State iscommittedto affirmative action, Mark Rothko. Each seascape consists of two tonally
komunyakaa, FrANCINE prose, and MlCHAEL waters equal opportunity,and the diversity
of itsworkforce.
different, equally sized rectangles meeting to form
the horizon. Made of sunless sky (air) or evenly
textured ocean (water), the primordial rectangles
are both calm and lifeless. Because there is no sign
of the ground (earth), no evidence of the shore,
and thus no ground where one might be standing
when seeing this view, one feels as if one is float
ing before a sunless (ormoonless) realm of air and
HUNGER MOUNTAIN water, an austere and abject place. Nothing thrives

The Vermont College Journal of Arts & Letters here.

FALL 2004 ISSUE art icicicozik

GUEST EDITORS Robin Behn -Abby Frucht - David Jauss - Clare Rossini

PROSE Sascha Felnsteln - Jennifer Grow -Geeta Sharma Jensen - Susan McCarty
Ahn Chi Pham - R. M. Ryan - Sheila M. Schwartz -Mark Turcotte

POETRY Cal Bedient - Richard Chess -Angel Crespo translated by Steven J. Stewart
Mark Doty - James Doyle - Ray Gonzalez -William - Susan Grimm
Greenway
Paul Guest - Terranee Hayes - Suzanne Heyd - Norbert Hirschhorn -Mark Irwin
Mark Jarman - Leonhard - Robert Nazarene - Brad Richard -
Sigi Myra Shapiro
Adrienne Su -Chad Sweeney - . IC.Todorovlch - Eliot Khalll Wilson

Dead Sea (1996)

One of the recurring features of Sugimoto's

7<??TH ST?7S?E 7>7<?ZE /iVPOETft^ photographs is the feeling that one is cut off from
gravity and from being grounded. The photographs
in Seascapes have been taken at various times dur
The second annual Ruth Stone Prize inPoetrywill be judged by Betsy Sholl. Thewinner will be awarded
and in the Spring 2005 Issue, honorable mentions will also be published. ing the day and at night. Some views are almost
$1,000.00 publication
The deadline for entries isDecember 10, 2004. Visit www.hungermtn.org tor guidelines. totally abstract, two barely different black rectan
a strong horizon, clear sky,
gles, while others show
Vermont College / Union Institute& University,36 College Street,Montpelier VT 05602 and wind-blown water. There are, however, neither
we are.
signs of life nor markers to indicate where
We are bodiless witnesses to an elemental world
www.hungermtn.org that is utterly calm, a primordial place that is silent
and nameless.

This is the ocean as our ancestors may have seen

subscribe submit stay tuned it.Or, ifwe are to go forward in time, itmay be the
way itwill be seen by the survivors of the oncom

12 THE AMERICANPOETRYREVIEW
 ing but unknown apocalypse, the disaster we have
been aiding with increasingly fervent carelessness.
Sugimoto's ability to take photographs that are dis James A. Michener Center forWriters
located from time and history distinguishes him
from both his contemporaries. He ismaking nei
ther an abstract photograph, nor a fictional set-up. y ?--y >''F*--*?
Iwould further argue that he has no predecessors.
Rather, beginning with his Dioramas, Sugimoto
has transformed the documentary tradition into
DIRECTOR
something altogether new.
Sugimoto's transformation of the documentary James Magnuson
tradition, its suspension of time, ismost evident
in his Wax Museums (1994), where he photographs
time that has already been halted. Focusing his at
tention on wax figures in situ, Sugimoto's subjects Join our selective and close-knit
include the living and the dead, heads of state and
individuals about to be executed. Made ofwax, the community of writers at a first-rate
figures have devolved into effigies that exist in a university in the cultural mecca that is
hyperreal world inwhich time does not pass. They
are perfectly preserved corpses Austin, Texas. Students are fully funded
existing in a state of
suspended animation. They are three-dimensional byannual fellowships of$17,500.
?
512/471.1601 www.utexas.edu/academic/mcw

RESIDENT
& RECENT
VISITINGFACULTY

Suzan Zeder Kroll

Judith RobertFoshko MichaelAdams
Lee Blessing DavidWevill Stephen
Harrigan Oscar Casares

NaomiIizuka Thomas
Whitbread StuartKelban Laura Furman

Kramer
Sherry Kleinzahler
August Lewis
Richard Ghose
Zulfikar
The Garrote (1994)
Ruth
Margraff Heather
McHugh MitkoPanov Harris
Elizabeth
photographs ofwhat a photograph does, which is AliceTuan MarieHowe Charles Ramirez-Berg J.M.Coetzee
transform livingmaterial into an image.
is our way of chronicling time; NaomiShihab
Nye William
Recording history Hauptman JamesKelman
it is a convention we use to confer purpose on our
lives. Taken together, the Dioramas, Seascapes, and TimMcCanlies DavidBradley
Wax Museums embody three differentways we have
chronicled time passing. By presenting us with AnneRapp Giardina
Anthony
wax effigies (perfectly
preserved corpses) from DenisJohnson
different periods, as if they are all equally important
(and perhaps equally unimportant), Sugimoto sub Lars Gustafsson
verts our understanding of history as a story about
destiny and purpose. His breakdown of both hier Ana Menendez
archy and chronology suggests time's passing may
be purposeless. And yet, his vision isn't of heaven Williams
Joy
or hell, it is of a cold, silent
place that has no name,
but which closely resembles reality. In this reality,
time is no longer linear and episodic. Instead of THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
unfolding, it accumulates, like the light of a film
or displays in amuseum of natural history or a wax
museum. One is lefttowonder ifreality is ameasure
less sarcophagus containing us all, the living, dead,
and those not yet born?
With both a sense of awe and foreboding, we
look at a world which resembles ours down to the
smallest detail, but inwhich no sign of human life,
5 um poetry
our selves (our bodies), is visible. Instead, editors: Ed Ochester and Judith Uollmer
including
we see perfectly frozen memories. Both the Dio
ramas and the Wax Museums
might remind us of Kathleen Norris, Rlicia Ostriker, Billy Collins, Bob Hicok, Edward
a storage unit in a cryonics facility. In this
facility Field, Nick Carbo, Toi Berricotte, Charles Webb, Robin Becker,
(or way station), the clients choose the circum Gerald Locklin, Jan Beatty, Uirgil Suarez, Christopher Buckley,
stances inwhich theywill wait to be revived. If so,
then the desire collectively shared by these dis Nin Rndreuis, Dorothy Barresi, Ronald Wallace, Ron Koertge,
Denise Duhamel, Tony Hoagland, Mark Co?, Jesse Lee
parate individuals is to be brought back to the life
they left behind, however bleak itmay be. Sugi Kercheual, Diane di Prima, Terranee Hayes, many others.
moto's photographs suggest that that one is fated
to become either a faultless corpse or a bodiless $15/4 issues (2 years) ? $5/sample ? checks to:
ghost. Possessing no memory, the corpse is caught
in a frozen moment, while the ghost floats freely 5 RM ? Boh 205 ? Spring Church, PR ? 15686
through time, unable to inhabit it.

~~
2004
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER ^
 II.

Sugimoto's most recent series Architecture (1997)

marks a formal break from his earlier work. He
MFA @ PLU has jettisoned hyperrealism in favor of a distinctly
Rainier Writing Workshop blurred image. The blurring shifts his subjects,
which are landmark structures, into a dreamlike
Low Residency
stillness. Often we feel as ifwe are squinting or

INNOVATIVE ? CHALLENGING ? MULTI-GENRE standing underwater. Is the building being imag

ined in the mind's eye? Is it being remembered?
Or does it exist just beyond the clarifying edge of
A Distinguished Faculty our perception? By defamiliarizing well-known

Writers buildings, some of which we may have an image

for Discerning of in our mind, Sugimoto compels us to consider
them with renewed attentiveness.
Charles In terms of subject matter, the buildings inArchi
Bergman
Sharon
tecture mark amove away from places of entertain
Bryan
ment (theaters, drive-ins) and enlightenment (natu
Scott Ely
ral history museums, wax museums) to structures
Albert Goldbarth that are largely regarded as either symbols (Gustave
Lola Haskins Eiffel's Eiffel Tower [1998], Wallace K. Harrison's

David Huddle United Nations Headquarters [1997]) or physical

manifestations of Utopian thinking (OttoWagner's
JudithKitchen Austrian Post Office Saving Bank [2001], Peter Behren's World Trade Center (1997)
Stephen Kuusisto Aeg Turbine Factory [2000], Antoni Gaud?'s Casa
Susan Batllo [1998]). Furthermore, while the theaters and
Ludvigson
Kent Meyers drive-ins are largely anonymous public spaces, the building, alone inside a largely dark, empty room,
landmark buildings are tourist sites, places that or floating high in the air so that only the build
Ann Pancake
have been heavily documented in postcards, photo ing's identifying tower is visible. By dislocating the
Lia Purpura graphs, and films. For Sugimoto, the challenge was buildings from their familiar views and symbolic
Peggy Shumaker how to dislodge these landmark sites from our status, Sugimoto asks: what do theymean to us?
Stan Sanvel Rubin clich?d views of them, as well as tomake them If they are embodiments of a higher aspiration,
new without distorting them beyond recognition. how close have we come to achieving those goals?
Marjorie Sandor In contrast to his Theaters, Drive-ins, and Sea In viewing structures where we feel as ifwe are
scapes, which have a recurring format, as well as floating, disembodied presences, we sense thatwe
Master Class: follow a pre-established trajectory, the images in are looking at
something both in
our past and in
Architecture are farmore various in their viewpoints our future. It is either amemory or a dream, both
Marvin Bell
and angles of sight. In terms of a vantage point, of which are insubstantial, elusive experiences.
we might be located outside a sarcophagus-like Understood as things of the past, the
buildings be
& Special Guests

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Poetry Andrea Barrett
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14 THE AMERICANPOETRYREVIEW
come ghostlymonuments to our unfulfilled desires
for utopia, while seen as things iriour future, they
become unattained ideals. At the same time, in a
number of photographs, particularly of shadowy
interiors punctuated by light, Sugimoto has re
turned to preoccupations that he first addressed
in his Theaters.
In order to effect these various changes, Sugi
moto had to reevaluate his entire conceptual ap
proach to the camera. Ifhe was going to reconsti
tute reality, as he had done by photographing wax
figures, then he had to do so without resorting to a
hyperrealist presentation. Hyperrealism would not
have shown us time halted, but would have under
scored a building's surfaces, telling details, and
materiality. Ultimately itwould have betrayed the
metaphysical basis of Sugimoto's investigation of
brought him closer to the documentary
and
light
tradition of urban photographers such as Andreas
Feininger, Edward Weston, and Rudy Burkhardt.
Barragan House (2002), William Van Aleris Chrysler
Building (1997), Philippe Starck'sAsahi Breweries America Zen
(1997), and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum,
Bilbao (2000). All of them are closer to being A Gathering of Poets
things, rather than places. By dislocating them,
Sugimoto turns them into phantoms. Edited by Ray McNiece A Larry Smith
The fact thatwe might recognize these sites sug
gests that landmark buildings, however unique
theymight appear to us to be, are derived from a
handful of basic forms thathave been used through
out history. Thus, he photographs the reconstructed
in theMetropolitan Museum, Nin Andrews
Temple of Dendera David Budbill * ThomasRain
New York. The suggestion here?and it ismade *Kathe
fCrowe Davis *Diane di Primal
StanfordFoireste *Tess Gallagher
ever so lightly?is that architectural progress may * *
MargaretGibson JohnG?tgtm Netta
be an illusion, that we are still using the same * *
Gillespic Sam Hamill William Heyen
JaneHiishfield *Holly Hughes *Mary Sue
forms our ancestors did.
Kocppel *Mark Kuhar* MacLojowsky
* *
By reducing well-known structures, both their "RayMcNiece ToraMontag ShinYu Pai j
Paul S. Piper * Maj Ragain *David Ray
exteriors and interiors, to basic forms and interlock [
Seido Ray Ronci *Andrew Schelling
?Paul Skyrra* Lany Smith* Tonyj
ing planes of shadow and light, Sugimoto rids his
Triglio* Chase TwkheU^
subject of ornamental detail. It is as if the ocean AnneWaldman.

Conceptually speaking, Sugimoto had to arrive
at a photograph that is not bound by time. His solu
tion was elegantly simple. He set the focal point
of his camera to twice "infinity," and found a par
ticular view that resonated with what we know of
his subjects, but that dislodged them from their
familiar surroundings and postcard vistas. In doing
so, he reconstituted themateriality of his subject
into an insubstantial presence, as well as trans
ported the viewer into a dreamlike realm.
In the photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright's Gug
genheim Museum, NewYork (1997), we see the upper
part of the curved and tiered facade, but neither
the whole building nor its circumstances. Instead
of being a familiar image of a historic building, it
has become a large sculptural object. The feeling
that we may be looking at a sculpture is also true
of other photographs in this series; Luis Barragan's
has worn their surfaces smooth. As nascent, un
adorned forms, they return us to thatmoment in
time when the building itself wasn't a finished
Eby
structure, much less a symbol. Instead of being a
completely fleshed-out idea, the shadowy forms An Essential Anthology of
evoke the possibility that they are still half-formed
ideas percolating in the architect's mind. Contemporary American Zen Poets
photo, biographic sketch, statement,
Architecture evokes the likelihood that all build and poems by each.
ings, no matter how innovative and forward looking Introduction by the editors.
theywere meant to be, will inevitably fail to live up
to their architect's idea of them. For while the archi Harmony Series $15.00 (postpaid)
ISBN 0-933087-91-8
tect is able to envision the prospect of achieving a Distributed throughSmall Press Distribution
and Baker & Taylor
sublime perfection, Sugimoto's interplay of light
and shadow brings tomind Plato's Allegory of the http://members.aol.com/Lsmithdog/bottomdog
Cave, and the idea that everything in this world is
just a shadow of itsperfect form. Evoking a vision in Bottom Dog Press,PO Box 425
the architect's mind, the photographs become shad rc/6Firelands College/ Huron, Ohio 44839
ows of shadows. Thus, even before we set out, our

University of Houston

2004-2005
Brown
Inprint
Faculty M.FA Ph.D.
Reading Series
-
J.Kast?ly
Director UNIVERSITYOF HOUSTON Writers-in-Residence
RobertBoswell CREATIVE
WRITINGPROGRAM
ChitraBanerjeeDivakaruni Eavan Boland
MarkDoty 229 ROYCULLEN BUILDING PaulMuldoon
NickFlynn HOUSTON,TX 77204-3015
Kimiko Hahn, Fail2005 (713)743-3015 VisitingWriters
Edward Hirsch, On leave Edward P.Jones
cwp@uh.edu
TonyHoagland Harryette Mullen
Cynthia Macdonald, Emeritus www.uh.edu/cwp CD. Wright
Ruben Martinez RichardRodriguez
AntonyaNelson AbrahamVerghese
RobertPhillips
ClaudiaRankine JeffreyEugenides
Eavan Boland
DanielStern
AdamZagajewski Application deadline for PaulMuldoon
EdwardAlbee Fall 2005 Semester: JudithOrtiz Cofer
School of Theatre Elena Poniatowska
January8,2005 Jonathan Franzen

Creative Writing Program

Teaching Assistantships and Fellowships available. The Universityof Houston isan AffirmativeAction/Equal Opportunity institution. ?2004

WritingProgramisa constituent
The Creative memberof theCynthia
Woods MitchellCenterfortheArts.

2004 15
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
 dreams of utopia are doomed to fail because they can be read as Sugimoto's own awareness of im
New IssuesPoetry e[ Prose will always be at least twice removed from perfection. pending mortality.
Because it is not always apparent if the forms we At the same time, read as analogues for our ex
are looking at are buildings or sculptures, we have istence before birth, both the theaters and the re
The Brenda Hillman Selections
the feeling thatwe have entered a world where we cent interiors transport us to thatmoment where
no longer know either themeaning or use of we have not y?t entered theworld of
things. light and thus
An atmosphere of complete estrangement prevails. of living. Instead, we exist as disembodied pres
As with the photographs from the Dioramas and Sea ences, ghosts. In his other series, particularly the
scapes, there are instances where we aren't even sure Dioramas and Wax Museums, our disembodiment
where we are standing; Devoid of details, theGuggen We are invisible presences
is understood differently.
heim Museum, New York, becomes a disquieting looking at examples of our collective history. We
husk. Like Guiseppe Terragni's Santelia Monument are wandering around in a realm that can be called
(1998) and Sutemi Horiguchi's Oshima Meteorologi the afterlife.
cal Station (2000), it appears to be-made of ice.
The dark sky inOshima Meteorological Station evokes Sugimoto first gained attention when he equated
a sunless world, a place where it is always the moment when a camera's shutters have just
night.
The stark silent realm all the structures inhabit opened with being born. Three decades later, and
is disconcerting formany reasons, not the least of with utter objectivity, in a room (orworld) where
which is the sense that the world is unpopulated, the enclosing structure seems to be dissolving into
perhaps even abandoned. What repeatedly comes something akin to shadows, he focuses our atten
across is a feeling of complete isolation, a world tion on the light. And even though thewalls seem
that is even more cold and indifferent than any to have devolved into an elemental presence, the
thing described by Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka. light remains nearby but remote. This time, how
The bleakness Sugimoto conveys isn't justmeta ever, the light is not framed by an elaborate architec
phorical. What makes these feelings even more tural fantasy, but by shadows.
unsettling is the utter objectivity of the photo In his photographs, Sugimoto proposes that the
graphs. In his hands, the camera seems to reveal desire to attain a state of permanence iswhat has
the essence of reality rather than just its surfaces. haunted each of us throughout history, and that
An icy, indifferentmachine animates time. our perceiving consciousness possesses an insa
Sugimoto's photographs remind us that archi tiable desire for revelation. In our unavoidable iso
tecture is a particularly delicate and short-lived art lation this iswhat we share. In Sugimoto's photo
form. This becomes depressingly apparent when graph of Erik Gunnar Asplund's Woodland Cemetery
one tabulates the number of
buildings by Frank
LloydWright that have been destroyed in the name
of progress. This feeling of vulnerability ismore
deeply underscored by the events of September 11,
2001, when we learned how quickly and irrevocably
a
building can be made to collapse. Somber and
dark, Sugimoto's photographs of theWorld Trade
Center stir up all sorts of emotions. For one thing,
the photographs strike us as prescient, as if on
some level the
photographer knew that the two
towers would cease to exist in our lifetime.
We make intense emotional investments in cer
tain buildingsand structures. One cannot separate
the EiffelTower from Paris, for example, Casa Barilo
from Barcelona, or theWorld Trade Center from
New York. We regard these structures as living
symbols, as structures so potent in our imagination
that we think of them as possessing a life force.
And yet the world is in constant flux, and every
structure and monument is always approaching its
own demise. In Sugimoto's Architecture, we come
to the realization that the solid world isn't solid at
all, and perhaps itnever was.

FIVE COLORS Another way to look at Architecture is to uncover

possible groupings. For in addition to the buildings
poems by Stan Sanvel Rubin
that look like sculptures, there are also dark inte
"The poems here are riors punctuated by light, and tall shadowy forms. (2001), we are standing or floating on a path that
devastating, intelligent, and Made up of skyscrapers, this latter group has been leads directly to the horizon. There is no one beside
direct. But what's most transformed into ghostly structures that seem to us, and there is nothing else we can do but continue
remarkable is their range: lit be made up solely of shadows. Sentinels watching on the road that stretches out before us. In this
tle escapes Rubin, and he's
over a world devoid of human life,
not afraid to go in search of they seem to be world where time appears to have been suspended,

the sort of beauty that does standing in the place known as the "future,"wait we may not be able tomove forward at all. Itmay

n't necessarily reach the sur ing. In this group of photographs, itdoesn't matter be that all we can do is be witnesses to the world
face." ifwe turn towards the past or future, memory or thatwe once inhabited or have yet to enter. <
-Dionisio D. Martinez dreams, because we will always be greeted by si
Notes
lence and shadows.
1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard
"Five Colors reminds ?$?5?W5SS?5SSSS5??
^^^^^ In the three images of R. M. Schindler's house
us that the brain is a kind of (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 96.
(all 1997), the three of Antoni Gaudi's Casa Batllo 2. Ibid, 57.
Stan Sanvel Rubin,
(all 1998), Tadao Ando's Church ofLight (1997),
muscle.
with skill and smarts, lifts the
and other interior views, Sugimoto photographs
Pive Colors
tangible into the realm of the
light entering a darkened room. The difference in
lyrical imagination without
these works is that the interiors are no longer finely John Yau recentlycompleted editing a selection of his
losing it." Ordering Information essays, The Passionate for the University of
Publishedby:Custom
Words Spectator,
detailed. Rather, the walls seem to be constructed
-Marvin Bell
Order Five Colors fromyour local bookstore Michigan Press. His nextbook of poems will be published
www_Amazon.com www.barnesandnoble.com out of shadows. It is as if the light,walls, and shad by Penguin in 2006. He teaches at Mason Gross School
ISBN: 1-932339-49-3, Softcover,88 pages, $17.00
ows are equally elemental. Registering his own in of the Arts, Rutgers University.
Email to bookorder@wordtechcommunications.com
evitable movement towards dissolution, this change photographsbyHiroshiSugimoto,courtesy
SonnabendGallery.

16 THE AMERICANPOETRYREVIEW