Seeing Time: The Beauty of Extinction

24 July 2026

There are artists whose work becomes familiar long before it becomes fully understood.

Over the years, I have encountered Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographs in museums and galleries across several countries, returning repeatedly to the quiet stillness of his Seascapes, the ghostly luminosity of his Theatres and the immaculate precision of his conceptual works. During my previous professional work with Pace Gallery, where Sugimoto was represented for many years, I had the privilege to study his catalogues in depth, tracing the evolution of a practice that has long occupied a singular position within contemporary photography.

Yet it was only after visiting Hiroshi Sugimoto: Extinction at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, that I realised I had never fully understood it.

Rather than presenting Sugimoto's celebrated series as independent achievements, the exhibition gently dissolves the boundaries between them. What initially appears to be a retrospective gradually unfolds as something far more intimate: the autobiography of an artist told not through chronology, but through ideas. The accompanying texts — remarkably personal, generous and philosophically lucid — allow Sugimoto to guide visitors through the internal logic of his own imagination. Suddenly, decades of photographs cease to exist as isolated masterpieces. They become a single continuous meditation on evolution, civilisation, memory, perception and, above all, time.

Perhaps that was the exhibition's greatest gift. I did not leave having discovered new photographs. I left feeling as though I had finally learned how to read them.

One sentence, in particular, lingered long after I left the museum: a person can live long enough to witness an innovation become extinct.

It is a deceptively simple observation that quietly encapsulates the entire exhibition. Within a single human lifetime, technologies emerge carrying the promise of permanence before fading into obsolescence. Civilisations flourish before becoming archaeological remains. Artistic media once considered revolutionary eventually become historical artefacts. Extinction, an idea that Sugimoto repeatedly returns to, is not simply disappearance. It is the inevitable rhythm of time itself — and perhaps the very reason life possesses beauty.

Time has always been Sugimoto's true medium.

Photography, in his view, is not a device for capturing the present but a machine capable of travelling across centuries. He describes the camera as an extension of the human eye: the lens corresponding to the crystalline lens, the aperture to the pupil and the film to the retina. Only one component lacks a biological equivalent — the shutter. It is here that Sugimoto introduces one of his most elegant metaphors. If the camera otherwise mirrors the human eye, then the duration of an exposure may be imagined as a human lifetime. A single photograph therefore becomes an attempt to comprehend the length of time required for civilisation itself to emerge.

Photography ceases to record moments. Instead, it measures existence.

Appropriately, Extinction begins not with humanity but with life itself.

::::

Against dark grey walls and beneath subdued lighting, visitors first encounter giant tortoises and cacti from the Galápagos Islands. The reference to Charles Darwin is unmistakable, yet Sugimoto's intention reaches beyond evolutionary theory. These photographs quietly establish the philosophical foundation for everything that follows. Evolution reminds us that all life shares common origins before gradually diverging through time. Humans may have mastered technology, architecture and science, but we remain participants in the same natural continuum.

That thought deepens as the exhibition moves towards our closest living relatives. Photographs of early hominids from East Africa possess an unsettling familiarity. Their gestures, expressions and quiet presence dissolve the comfortable distance we often place between ourselves and the animal world. As humanity continues to erode the habitats from which these species emerged, it becomes clear that our own history remains inseparable from theirs. The progression towards the evolution of mammals, humanity and even cannibalism quietly dismantles any illusion that civilisation represents a clean break from nature. We have evolved, but we have never ceased to belong to it.

If evolution forms the exhibition's beginning, illusion becomes its next great theme.

Sugimoto's celebrated Theatres series remains one of the most conceptually remarkable achievements in contemporary photography. Leaving the camera's shutter open for the duration of an entire feature film, the artist compresses every frame, every narrative and every emotional climax into a single luminous white screen. What survives is neither cinema nor architecture alone, but accumulated time itself. The empty theatres — grand palaces, modest cinemas and abandoned auditoriums alike  — become strangely melancholic. Every story of joy, anger, sorrow and love has unfolded within these spaces, yet all narrative ultimately dissolves into light. Sugimoto urges us to consider where truth resides. If every emotion disappears into a blank screen, what remains? Life itself begins to feel like theatre — fleeting, beautiful and impossible to hold.

Between illusion and contemplation stands a single photograph of Kegon Falls in Japan. Sugimoto describes waterfalls as manifestations of nature before which humans instinctively seek consolation. In moments of uncertainty, we turn either towards God or towards nature's own creations. The waterfall becomes both threshold and purification, preparing us for what is, for many, the emotional heart of the exhibition.

The Seascapes have always occupied a special place within Sugimoto's practice, but within the narrative of Extinction they assume even greater significance. Standing before the sea brings peace because the water flowing through our veins once belonged to the oceans from which all life emerged. Our blood, quite literally, remembers its origins. Every horizon is almost identical, yet no two photographs feel the same. Morning mist over Lake Superior dissolves into pure whiteness. Other bodies of water carry darker tonalities, while blurred horizons erase the distinction between sea and sky altogether. Their subtle differences remind us that countless forms emerge from a single source.

There was one reunion I had quietly anticipated. Aegean Sea, Pilion (1990) has long been my favourite work in Sugimoto's entire oeuvre, yet seeing it here altered my relationship with it. For years I had admired its stillness; now I understood the philosophy that made such stillness possible. Sugimoto did not travel in search of remarkable views, but of places capable of sustaining prolonged attention. His horizons are less descriptions of the world than traces of an encounter between the external landscape and an interior one.

The curved gallery in which the seven monumental Seascapes were installed unexpectedly reminded me of the 2023 Mark Rothko exhibition rooms at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The comparison is less formal than emotional. While Rothko surrounds the viewer with colour until painting becomes meditation, Sugimoto achieves something similar through horizon alone. Instead of the photographs ceasing to appear empty, they become impossibly full.

:::

The exhibition's second movement shifts from natural evolution towards the evolution of civilisation itself.

Few visitors may know that between 1979 and the late 1980s, Sugimoto operated a Japanese antiques gallery in New York, specialising in works ranging from Kamakura-period Buddhist sculptures to Heian-period sutras. Living among objects that had already travelled through centuries profoundly altered his understanding of time. History ceased to be abstract — it could be held, examined and cared for.

This experience quietly underpins the photographic series that follow.

Architecture, stylised sculpture and conceptual forms examine humanity's desire to understand the world through intellect rather than instinct. Architectural masterpieces by Luis Barragán and Le Corbusier are deliberately rendered out of focus. Their iconic forms become strangely dreamlike — as though modernism itself already belonged to memory. These photographs are less concerned with buildings than with ambition: humanity's confidence in constructing permanence from concrete, mathematics and reason.

Fashion receives an equally philosophical treatment. Sugimoto traces its origins to the Garden of Eden, where the first act of clothing marked humanity's departure from Paradise. Ever since, garments have become expressions of identity, wealth, intellect and aspiration. Yet by reducing haute couture — including great classics by Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, Dior and Madeleine Vionnet — to mathematically idealised forms, the artist strips fashion of vanity itself. Desire disappears, and pure form remains.

At this point, the exhibition quietly shifts from what Sugimoto photographed to how he chose to live and work.

::::

Beginning in 2001, following a Noh performance staged within one of the artist's exhibitions in Austria and his reconstruction of Go'o Shrine on Naoshima, Sugimoto's practice expanded far beyond photography into architecture, traditional theatre, calligraphy, landscape, cuisine and spatial design. This evolution unfolded simultaneously with the rise of digital photography — a technological transformation that quietly marked the beginning of the end for the gelatin silver process to which Sugimoto had devoted his career.

Many artists might have resisted such a shift. Sugimoto embraced it.

In a culture that often encourages increasingly narrow specialisation, Sugimoto's career suggests the opposite philosophy. A creative life should never remain fixed. One discipline reaches its limits so another may emerge. Extinction becomes transformation.

Seen from this perspective, the exhibition's title acquires extraordinary resonance.

Its final rooms examine portraiture, electricity, optics and photography itself. Portraits become humanity's latest attempt to preserve life against death, continuing traditions once fulfilled through embalming and painting. The electric light series traces civilisation's journey from witnessing lightning as divine spectacle to mastering electricity through science. The colourful optical works, perhaps among the exhibition's most mesmerising, reveal astonishing depths concealed within apparently singular colours. Inspired by Isaac Newton yet extending beyond scientific inquiry, it becomes clear that entire worlds are hidden between colours that the human eye scarcely notices.

Throughout, nature quietly continues to surpass every system humanity invents to explain it.

The exhibition ends with a display of subtle elegance. A fragment of the Heian-period Hell Scroll, attributed to the monk Jakuren, rests above a miniature optical-glass pagoda containing one of Sugimoto's own seascapes of the Norwegian Sea from Vesterålen. More than eight centuries separate these objects, yet they seem engaged in the same conversation. Both are acts of preservation. Both resist disappearance. Both ask what remains after time has done its work.

Nearby, Sugimoto leaves visitors with a final reflection:

Like the blink of an eye, a person's life is short. Before you know it, it's over.

Walking back into the summer light of Tokyo, those words lingered with me less as a meditation on mortality than as an invitation to attention.

We cannot slow time. We cannot prevent extinction — of species, technologies, artistic media or ourselves. What we can do is look carefully while we are here.

Perhaps that has always been Hiroshi Sugimoto's project.

Not simply to photograph the world, but to teach us how to see time.

And once you begin to see time, it becomes impossible to look at his photographs in quite the same way again.