“Red to yellow, yellow to green, then green to blue — the projected colors contain an infinity of tones and change every moment. I am engulfed in color. Particularly when the colors fade and fuse into darkness, the gradation seems to melt away into pure mystery.”
—Hiroshi Sugimoto
Having studied Sir Isaac Newton's and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s experiments with prisms and light, Hiroshi Sugimoto approached his recent project with a deep curiosity about the material properties of light, and photography’s ability to capture the invisible. In Opticks, named after Newton’s 1704 book, Sugimoto utilized photography’s oldest camera obscura technique by creating a darkened room in his studio with a small opening and a prism placed in front so that light could pass through it. As the sun rose and set outside, pure light, in all its infinite colors, was cast from the prism onto a customized mirror, which allowed Sugimoto to separate the colors, and was subsequently captured by his lens. The resulting photographs are thus images of light, created by light, a stunningly vivid fusing of subject and media.
Sugimoto debuted Opticks in an exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery in 2020. This is the first time the series is appearing at auction.