Hiroshi Sugimoto
Sam Eric, Pennsylvania

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Artist Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, born 1948)Japanese, born 1948

CultureJapanese

Titles

Sam Eric, Pennsylvania

Date1978

Place depictedPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 16 5/8 × 21 7/16 in. (42.2 × 54.5 cm)
Sheet: 19 15/16 × 23 7/8 in. (50.6 × 60.6 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Louisa Stude Sarofim Charitable Trust courtesy of Mary Lawrence Porter and by the S. I. Morris Photography Endowment

Object number99.349

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionHiroshi Sugimoto’s Sam Eric from his Theaters series collapses the multiple frames of a feature film into a single still image, so that what we assume to be the blink of a camera eye is actually an exposure lasting well over an hour. His process is quite simple: he set up his view camera in the balcony or projection booth, opened the shutter when the film began, and closed it when it was over. Paradoxically, the effect of thousands of individual projected images illuminates the architectural frame of the screen, which becomes a glowing void. There is an elegiac quality to Sugimoto’s photographs, for even at the time that he made these photographs, the grand old movie palaces of the past were endangered. The 2,450-seat Sam Eric, which opened in the Center City district of Philadelphia on Christmas Day of 1928, fell into disuse and disrepair, and all but its facade and lobby was demolished earlier this year.
Provenance[Zeit-Foto Co., Ltd., Tokyo]; purchased by MFAH, 1999.
Exhibition History"Ewan Gibbs: Arlington National Cemetery," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 11 November, 2012 - 10 February, 2013.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Inscription: The photograph is inscribed in pencil, verso, lower right: "Sam Erie Pennsylvania 1978 (signature) 8/25".

The photograph is signed in pencil, verso, lower right.

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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