Lightning Strikes/Sugimoto at the Fraenkel Gallery

Lightning Fields

Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Fraenkel Gallery, Sept 10-Oct 31

The new photographs are stark black and white, no shades of grey. Both strong and delicate, all white on black, they arouse both reverence and delight.

These huge silver gelatin prints magnify and celebrate the challenges infamously inherent in the large format photography of lightning. He celebrates, he blows up, the scars on the negatives. He shoots on 10” by 14”plates and selects a portion of that image to magnify. The finished prints come in a relatively modest 18” by 23”and the giant 6’ by 5’.

All these images are titled Lightning Fields and a number. This uniformity of title underlines what is repeated in the images and what is varied. What is repeated is the branching capillary like action of lightning, textures that resemble trees and branches, fur and feathers, sand and water, veins and ridges. Cut like, branchlike, feeler like, shapes leak white light and round luminescent, transparent globes, float, suggest eyes or spherical bodies. These images are powerful, elegant, and beautiful as abstractions, but the strong suggestions of the organic and representational are magical and delightful, containing even more fully the power of the truly unexpected.

Each image combines these textures in unique ways. Lightning Fields 119, 2009, is reminiscent of trees beneath moons flying by night. Lightning Fields 145, 2009, is a benevolent seascape, the lower image suggesting a giant sea millipede, the upper image a blowfish. In Lightning Fields 128, 2009, a white torrent sprouts what could be capillaries, or root filaments, or even long scruffy hairs.

These images are confections of scale. Interstellar space and the microscopic are simultaneously evoked. Images sometimes suggest a giant organic spacecraft, a creature, capable of traveling through empty space vast distances of black, sometimes sea creatures of the heavy gravity/pressure, the super deep, with transparent luminescent bodies and giant shining eyes. Sometimes the creatures evoke dragons or centipedes with long spotted tails and sharp tentacles of branchlike cracks. Sometimes the images resemble a many armed furry being dancing in the sky, each furry arm with a small claw of burst branching lightning. Smaller, more leaf like, or plant like, electrical forms also occur.

Two large leaf images from 2007 from his ongoing series of reprints of the work of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the positive negative process, are also included in the show. These images emphasize his continuing examination of the organic, of repetitions of structure, and of issues of expectation and illusion and of scale, of what size an original may be compared to its image.

The resemblance of the structure of lightning to the substances and minerals of nature and to the living, the organic, is strongly made present in every print. This similarity of structure among all of us whose systems make and use electricity emphasizes the work’s spiritual component, reminds us of the underlying harmony of the universe, of the repetition and variation of the universe, of unmediated revelation.