Photo-Respiration: Tokihiro Sato
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Sato creates these streaks by acting as his own sun. He sets up his eight-by-ten-inch view camera, often at night, then wanders through his scenes–some urban, some rural–waving a flashlight. Using hour-long exposures (for daytime shots he stacks neutral density filters on the lens to slow the film’s speed), he renders the moving lights visible but never appears himself. Instead of standing behind the camera–which makes self-portraiture an acrobatic act–and letting an external light source illuminate the film, he’s hiding behind his own light. His figures are calligraphic–and acrobatic in a different sense, if you consider how many stairs he climbed. He calls his images “breath-graphs,” records of his huffing and puffing–hence the show’s title, “Photo-Respiration.”
For daytime shots Sato flashes a compact mirror instead of a flashlight at the camera, creating images with many points of light, and–once you understand the gimmick–engendering an endless Where’s Waldo hunt for the photographer. Several coastal images, among them #330 Taiji (1998), show lights amid boulders in a fog–which turns out to be waves averaged over the long exposure while Sato was out there swimming among the rocks, signaling his position back to the camera. The effect is to dissolve his body in an aqueous medium of time and light: an elegant jest since these are photography’s most basic materials. Sato’s daytime photos lack the automatic surrealism of his night views, but the best of them make up for it with the strange comedy of his effort to create a universe with multiple suns. The cleanest example (which the Art Institute has added to its permanent collection) is #352 Kashimagawa (1998), a straightforward forest scene with dozens of bright white lights, each one replicating the starlike aperture in his camera lens. Photographs are made by reflected light: here it glances back like invisible fairies.
10 AM-5 PM.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.
