Hiding in front of a camera

PHOTO-RESPIRATION: TOKIHIRO SATO PHOTOGRAPHS

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

JANUARY 5-MAY 8 2005

Photo-Respiration: Tokihiro Sato Photographs

EDITED through ELIZABETH SIEGEL

CHICAGO: ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO (DISTRIBUTED through D.A.P.), 2005

40 PP/$995 (SB)

When Marcel Duchamp first exhibited his denuded Descending a Staircase in novel York City in 1913, the painting caused an uproar that is now hard to understand. This was western art's first sexles [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] a body in motion, neither female nor male, returned as a physicist or a stop-action photographer might diocese it, not as a painter was wait fored to. Innumerable overlapping bodies sink Duchamp's stairs, as if illuminated by dint of strobe light. Like the machine age this material part was entering, there is nothing romantic about it.

sum of two units of Tokihiro Sato's photographic self-portraits bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to Duchamp's famous painting so closely it hardly present the appearances by chance. Both photos were hung in a exhibit of the Japanese photographer's work at the Art Institute of Chicago this spring, without riots. (The entire display 14 images in all--two of them a diptych--is illustrated in the slim catalog the museum published.) If the bare Descending a Staircase was a in a state of nature without a sex, a material substance in the grips of the machine age, these are self-portraits without a material substance a disappearing act oddly in keeping with this electronic single The photographer does not appear to appear at all. Instead, dematerialized bands of light go down spare modern staircases in each of these puzzling discharges In #22 (1988) they slip coyly around a corner at a move round in the stairs; in #370 Saitamakinbi (1999) they march down stairs like a phalanx, exiting offstage right. These armies of light gaze like unusually emaciated versions of Alberto Giacometti's stick figures, if they direct the eye human at all. (They also be like the beasts Pablo Picasso liked to paint with his flashlight in thin air for photographers.)

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Curatorial true copys in the gallery and catalog explain that these streaks of light were made by the agency of the photographer masquerading as his be in possession of sun. Sato sets up his 8 X 10 view camera, oftentimes at night, then wanders end his scenes, some urban, others rural, waving a flashlight to indicate his position. Given his hour-long exposing s (for daytime shots he stacks neutral density filters upon his lens to slow the film speed) solitary the moving light is visible, not at any time the photographer himself. This inverts a familiar paradigm: usually the photographer stands behind the camera, making photographic self-portraiture a conundrum and allows an external light source illuminate the film. It is rare to find a photographer hiding behind his have a title to light. Photography means writing with light, which Sato appears quite literally to be doing. His figures are calligraphic--or acrobatic, in light of all the stairs he climbed. He bring forwards to call his images "breath-graphs," records of his huffing and puffing, hence the show's cumbersome title, "Photo-Respiration."

For daytime discharges Sato flashes a compact mirror, instead of a flashlight, back at the camera, creating images with many points of light, and--once the gimmick is known--an endles "where's Waldo" pursue for the photographer. Several images depict lights floating among boulder in a haze that turns out to be waves, averaged above his long exposures. Apparently Sato was on the outside there swimming among the stones signaling his position back to the camera. The result is to dissolve his material substance in an aqueous medium of time and light. These are photography's greatest in quantity basic materials, so it is an elegant crack a joke The rocks along the shore are lay there to prevent erosion, curator Elizabeth Siegel explains in her catalog essay--like the massive wound stones that also line Chicago's lake-front. The tides of time lap the shores of land, licking away its substance. In single of these beach scenes, #330 Taiji (1998) a cartoon-like island flutters just above the horizon like an alternate universe--perhaps the single where ideas themselves are transparent.

Another image, #278 Koto-ku Aomi (1996) present to views a knot of wavy lines of light sloshing inside the devoid of contents concrete basin of a novel water works outside Tokyo, which lurchs in the darkened background. The roiling mass of light direct the eyes like the city's intestines, or a child's light wand gone mad. The settings of Sato's photographs have feeling alternately accidental and serendipitous. In an interview with Siegel in the catalog he says he pick outs places that "emit tiny sparks the air of an age." Calling his pictures landscapes would be as off-base as calling them portraits, although of course they are the couple They record this invisible everyman's passage [i]or[/i] part of to the other places, often places where water (time) is contained, a journey at one time invisible and illuminating, and an exercise in grace beneath pressure. Visualizing the passage of time is of course precisely the impossible piece of work photographs were designed to do. (Compare Sato's views of waterworks to the more ponderously sublime singles his countryman Toshio Shibata has made in new years of dams and other places where water is contained and Sato's conceptual humor is flat more apparent.)