Time Machine highlights Hiroshi Sugimoto’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into our understanding of time and memory, and photography’s ability to both document and invent.
This exhibition chronicles the artist’s practice over five decades, bringing together nearly 100 key works from his major photographic series: Dioramas, Theaters, Seascapes, Sea of Buddha, Portraits, and Lightning Fields, as well as the more recent Opticks – vivid colour photographs of prism-refracted light, the result of almost a decade of experimentation, described by the artist as “a new kind of painting.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Teatro dei Rozzi, Siena, 2014, gelatin silver print. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
Sugimoto’s approach to photography has stretched and reshaped our ideas about how photographs record time, light, and space, functioning as a temporal corridor that captures and preserves the past. Through images that unsettle and inspire, he has transformed traditional photographic genres such as still life, landscape, portraiture and abstraction to open new perspectives on how we understand history, nature, art and existence itself.
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
2 August to 27 October 2024
Sydney