A few weeks back, I was lucky enough to wander around The Museum of Modern Art and, in addition to (finally) getting to check out Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World—one of my most favorite paintings in the world, stunning in person—I stumbled upon the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, specifically his Adriatic Sea, Gargano (triptych):
I prattle on a lot about about my love of landscapes. To me, this is where stories start—a place, a time, maybe, but anchored in some place. This is what gets my juices flowing, how a something develops. I’m especially drawn to forests (having grown up in Michigan), and lakes and mountains, too, but there is something about the desolate landscapes (deserts, the ocean) that gets my mind whirring.
Seeing this series of photographs (from 1990), this sterile environment…my mind races. I want to write about it, I want to see it, I want to see life happening in these places. (And, thus, I want to write about life happening here.)
I was also really delighted to find out about his work, too:
To craft his exquisite black-and-white images, Hiroshi Sugimoto uses a 19th-century-style, large-format camera, exploring his idea of photography as a method for preserving and modeling time. “Endeavors in art are…mere approximations, efforts to render visible unseen realms,” he says.
True of writers, too, I think (which explains, perhaps, why I’m so drawn to his work).