Giacometti / Sugimoto - Staged

Catalogue for the exhibition "Giacometti / Sugimoto - On staged", presented at the Fondation Giacometti, Paris (5 April - 23 June 2024).

" In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned me to photograph its sculpture garden, designed by Philip Johnson and home to many masterpieces of modernist sculpture. I decided to approach this commission by adopting the blurred approach I had used for my 'Architecture' series. Of these many masterpieces, the first to catch my eye was a sculpture by Giacometti.

It was a spindly work, as if the body no longer had any flesh, but it expressed an 'extreme' way of being, corresponding to what I wanted to capture with my approach to photography. So I photographed this sculpture twice, once in broad daylight and once at dusk. In my opinion, it evoked the image of two characters from the Noh theatre.

Noh is about dead souls coming back to life and becoming visible. In the maejite (the first part of a Noh play), the dead take on human form and lament their own demise. In the nochijite (second part), the ghosts of the dead reappear and perform a sad, bitter dance because they are unable to find rest in their graves. In theatrical performance, we catch a glimpse of the dead, with a degree of reality that depends not only on the power of the interpretation but also, to a large extent, on the spectator's capacity for imagination.
When I photographed Giacometti's sculpture, I had the impression of witnessing a Noh drama, because in Noh, the past is reborn as the present. Inspired by it, I went on to photograph other sculptures in the garden. " Hiroshi Sugimoto. October 2023.

CONTENTS

Past presence
Hiroshi Sugimoto

Giacometti and the Noh scene
Hiroshi Sugimoto

Confessions of a mask
Hiroshi Sugimoto

Koyane No Mikoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto

Like the sea absorbing its blades
Françoise Cohen

Framing space, aiming for time
Cécilia Brasch