Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters series, including this photograph of Radio City Music Hall, is based on his question “Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen.” Sugimoto (born 1948) sets up his camera in a cinema and photographs the theater for the duration of a film screening. His camera is fixed with a wide aperture and left for an exposure of approximately two hours. The resulting photograph is a bright white screen: the singular “trace,” as it were, or accumulation of the entire film projection. Through Sugimoto’s lens, the duration of the spectacle—and the cinematic time—is distilled into a single frame. This photographic series plays with the tensions between presence and absence, and trace and loss. Even though, at least at first glance, the visual effect approximates the seemingly white screen of Zen for Film, the work is on the opposite end of the spectrum: whereas Zen for Film is actually a blank film, Sugimoto’s photographs are full-length films turned into “nothing”—a compressed cinematic materiality. —LH

Image: Photograph courtesy the artist © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Pace Gallery.