Viewing Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Hayward Gallery

Over the last 50 years, the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has stubbornly resisted the rise of digital technology, instead pushing the craft of analogue photography to the max – with radical results. Sugimoto often uses a large-format wooden camera, mixing his own darkroom chemicals and developing his black-and-white prints by hand. The quality of his work has to be admired in person – no insta snap will do.

The artist collapses time and stretches space in his work, making the Hayward Gallery’s survey show a mesmerising journey. It includes seminal pieces such as Theaters (1976 – ), a series shot in movie palaces and drive-ins, in which he captures entire films with a single long exposure, rendering all the dramatic action into one image of radiant whiteness. Also shown is Architecture (1997 -), his out-of-focus studies of iconic modernist buildings around the world, in which all their detail is blurred out, leaving behind just their ghostly silhouettes. Sugimoto shakes up both our understanding of the medium, and how we look at the world around us.