(Hard to quite believe that Sugimoto is sometimes mistaken for an actual wildlife photographer.) By the time you get to his picture of two ancient apes out for a leisurely stroll (one’s arm around the other) while behind them a volcano erupts, he’s just plain having fun. His visits to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for instance, have resulted in a dramatic series in which he brings dioramas of stuffed vultures, wolves, and a tribe of shaggy monkeys to life.īut look closer at a polar bear inspecting the freshly crushed skull of a seal, and life seems stranger: the drops of blood lead back to a crack in the ice – which is clearly a painted backdrop. But Sugimoto, 75 years old and still staggeringly inventive, gives you plenty more. Theaters is reason enough to see this tremendous exhibition.

The gleam is such that, for a moment, I was certain that the photographs had been mounted on a lightbox (no, these pictures, with the help of strategically placed spotlights, just glow like that). Sometimes, the screen suffuses the theatre with a soft haze sometimes, it hits you as a sharp burst – comedies, the artist says, shine the brightest. Then, its flared edges begin to reveal details of the seemingly empty, abandoned theatre: looming art-deco alcoves, rococo columns, and a Grecian frieze of prancing trumpeters, straight out of the golden age of American movie palaces. In each monochrome portrait, as a result of the long exposure time, the screen has become a gleaming white pane. Head closer, and you’ll find Theaters: the grand cinemas Sugimoto has been capturing for five decades. One of the first things a visitor to the Hayward Gallery’s retrospective, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, will notice is a field of white dots, burning bright in the half-gloom. He opened the shutter as the film began, and closed it hours later, when the source of light had finally disappeared. The price of entry was a dollar the place so ramshackle that nobody noticed him unfold an antiquated bellows camera in the last row. In 1976 – a few years after he’d left Tokyo for New York, by way of art school in LA – Hiroshi Sugimoto walked into a cinema in Manhattan’s East Village.

Ripple on hanging screen curtain