In this section of the exhibition, you find a selection of photographs of drive-ins from Sugimoto's larger “Theaters” series. Sugimoto travelled around the United States photographing the quintessentially American pastime where people could watch movies in the comfort of their own cars parked in front of an outdoor screen. Here, in the photograph before you, Tri City Drive-in, San Bernardino from 1993. Sugimoto positions the camera below the screen. The glowing rectangle looks like a shining beacon in the night sky. The artist matched the camera's exposure to the length of the movie. Thus, reducing the entire film to a single image. The brilliantly white blank screen illuminates the foreground. Our eyes focus on the highlighted surrounding vegetation and eerily empty playground, board of children playing or even an audience for the film.

The long exposure captured the trajectories of passing aircraft and satellites, creating crisscrossing minds behind the enormous screen. Genres of film have different lighting, and this has varying effects on how brilliant and shining the screen will be in Sugimoto's images. Horror films tend to be darker to increase suspense, whereas romance movies are lighter following along with the happy ending. What type of film do you think Sugimoto's camera has captured here?

In this photograph, we are looking at Lake Superior, the largest body of freshwater in the world, which spans the Canadian province of Ontario and the US states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The geographical situation of the lake seems to be of secondary importance to Sugimoto in photographing it. Instead, it's the stark uniformity of his composition which is given priority, so much so that it barely seems like a seascape at all. When I stand back from the picture, it suggests a book with the horizon line as the fold between the pages.

The two works that you're looking at come from a series by Hiroshi Sugimoto called “Opticks”, which he made in 2018. In this series, the artist captures the effects of sunlight that has been transmitted through a glass prison placed in a dark room. Each image is a record of the colors that were revealed through that process. Some “Opticks” depict just one color, which is what you can see in number 27.

When you look at this photograph, the color is so even and rich and pigment that it appears as though the surface could have been painted almost. Sugimoto believed that these works are actually better understood as paintings rather than photographs, and he's spoken about wanting to capture just the colours themselves. The “Opticks” Series stands out for that very reason because it's entirely abstract. It's also unique because these photographs are the only color images that Sugimoto has ever made. Other works in the “Opticks” series capture several different colors. When you look at number 163, you can see at least two shades of blue at the bottom, which then transition into green and maroon before turning black. The effect is similar to imagery that relates to the Earth's atmosphere, and I think there's something in this photo that evokes outer space or something as equally evocative as the sky at night.

After moving to New York City in 1974, the artist visited cultural attractions such as the American Natural History Museum, famous for its lifelike animal habitat dioramas, created by Robert Rockwell and Carl Akeley, pioneers of modern taxidermy. Sugimoto was fascinated by these displays of stuffed animals before painted backdrops and false foliage. Returning in 1976, he spent many evenings photographing the exhibits in the museum using his old-fashioned large format wooden box camera. Polar Bear from 1976 was one of his first images depicting a polar bear in an arctic landscape, paused with its mouth open before a freshly caught seal at its feet. He explains, "My life as an artist began the moment I saw with my own eyes that I hadn't succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film." Sometimes mistaken as a wildlife photographer, Sugimoto makes us question photography's capacity for truth telling.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was initially drawn to take pictures of the dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History in New York from a desire not merely to document, but to deceive. More specifically, he wanted to explore how in photographs, the dead can seemingly come back to life. To create images that could suggest this result, he used black and white film, which imbued these scenes of canned nature with a more plausibly lifelike appearance. And as he would with several later series, Sugimoto removed any sign of the surrounding milieu. The museum environment is never referenced in these images. Instead, these pictures immerse us in the speculative scenario of each individual diorama. Like photographs, dioramas evince a memorial quality, in as much as they present images of vanished life. Acutely sensitive to this aspect of their character, Sugimoto noted that on first encountering the dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, he was overwhelmed by the fragility of existence that they captured.

This photograph shows the Seagram Building on New York's Park Avenue, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the German-born modernist architect. It was revolutionary in its time for the use of functionless materials like glass, steel, and bronze, which were placed visibly on the building's outer surface instead of decoration or ornamentation of any kind.

Sugimoto has hailed Mies van der Rohe as a master and uses his photography as a kind of time travelling mechanism to take him back to the point at which the architect first imagined this now iconic building. By blurring out the details and showing us simply the rectilinear outline of the skyscraper against the New York skyline, Sugimoto gives us a glimpse into the mind's eye of the architect, where this now iconic structure first appeared.

The image you are seeing in front of you is of a mathematical model created in plaster at the end of the nineteenth century. Sugimoto photographed a whole series of these models at the University of Tokyo much, much later. As you look at the model, notice how its image is scarred and pitted, it looks ancient and worn. That's because it's been handled by a hundred years of mathematics students studying their academic field. Notice also that the image is very large in scale, much larger in scale than the actual object, which is small and handheld. Here again, Sugimoto is playing with ideas about representation and what it means to take a 2D image of the three-dimensional form. Notions of scale modelling and representation are at the core of Sugimoto's work, and beautifully on display here.

The object in front of you is a metallic representation of a mathematical structure called “a surface of revolution with constant negative curvature”. In mathematical terms, it can be seen as the geometric opposite of the sphere. It can also be understood as a geometric equivalent of the negative numbers. Notice how the tip almost seems to extend to infinity. In fact, in the real mathematical object, it would go to infinity and here Sugimoto alludes to that possibility. To make this finely crafted form, he turned to Japan's highest techniques of metallic milling and produced this gorgeously fine object. It is also a recreation of plaster models that he was inspired by such surfaces that were made in the nineteenth century, but those small, crude, handheld ones were chipped, and dinged, and aged. Sugimoto here wanted to recreate those beautiful nineteenth century objects, but in high-tech, modern technology with metal rather than plaster.

In 1995, after seven years of negotiating for permission, Hiroshi Sugimoto was finally allowed to photograph the 1,001 statues of Senju Kannon, inside Sanjūsangen-dō in Kyoto, Japan. Over the course of 10 days, Sugimoto created a series of 49 black & white, silver gelatin photos, titling them the "Sea of Buddha". Sugimoto photographed the statues with a large format, 8 × 10 camera on the tall tripod for three hours every day from 5:30 AM.

Capturing the gleaming statues led directly by the morning sunlight from a front facing angle. According to the artist, the end results are images, bestowing experience better than seeing the statues in real life, since the visitor can only see them in the terrible fluorescent light after the temple opens. The statues remain largely unchanged since the twelfth century, illuminated again by the same sunlight from the time of the temple's founding, these black and white photos transcend time and deliver a visuality of the statues as the people of the Heian period might have experienced.