Taking up the melody

A major figure in contemporary photography, Hiroshi Sugimoto continually questions our relationship with time and perception in his photographic practice.

The monographic exhibition dedicated to him at the Soulages Museum in Rodez, starting in April 2026, engages his photographs in a dialogue with the building's unique architecture, but also with the work of Pierre Soulages, around common themes: light, the anteriority of black, and the horizon as a spatial and metaphysical structure. Reprendre la mélodie, a book accompanying the eponymous exhibition, explores Sugimoto's work based on the notion of honka-dori, borrowed from classical Japanese poetry, which refers to the act of revisiting a previous work in order to shift its meaning and reactivate its significance. This principle of repetition allows us to view Sugimoto's series as a system of variations, where each image is constructed in conscious relation to pre-existing forms and knowledge: the accumulation of time until the image is erased (in the series "Theaters'), reduction of the landscape to an abstract and ahistorical structure (with the seascapes of Seascapes), exploration of optical phenomena and the limits of vision ("Opticks').
The book brings together iconic series–;Theaters, Opera Houses, Seascapes–;and more recent ones, such as Opticks and BrushImpression, in which the artist moves away from photography to explore calligraphic gestures in a polyptych of forty-eight drawings. These collections are analyzed in two essays–;written by the director of the Soulages Museum, Maud Marron-Wojewodzki, and art historian Céline Flécheux–;which examine how Sugimoto uses photography as a reflective medium. The image appears less as a trace of a pre-existing reality than as a mental construction, in which time, conceived as accumulation, duration, or exhaustion, becomes a material in its own right.