COULEURS DE L'OMBRE

Hiroshi Sugimoto
COULEURS DE L'OMBRE

Photographs: Hiroshi Sugimoto

Text: Hiroshi Sugimoto and Pierre-Alexis Dumas

Publisher: Editions Hermès

140 pages

Year: 2012

Comments: Hardcover, 28,9 x 28,9 cm color photographs. In very good condition other than marks of use on the white cover. Text in French and English.

"Between the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, I got into the habit of getting up at 5.30am every day. I'd start by observing the first light of dawn: if it was going to be a beautiful day, I'd spot the Shepherd's Star above and to the right of the dawning dawn. Then I'd get out my old Polaroid camera and start to warm up a roll of film frozen by the long winter night. After passing through the black, empty space, the sunlight hits my prism, refracting into an infinite continuum of colours. To perceive each nuance clearly, I've fitted a mirror with a mechanism that allows it to be tilted by micromovements. Projecting the ray of colour from the prism onto the mirror, I reflected it back to a darkroom where I reduced it to Polaroid colours. By adjusting the angle of this long, high mirror, I was able to break down the prismatic colours even further, so as to reflect just one colour. Red, for example, I subdivided into an infinite number of shades of red - each one sublimated by the darkness. The colours of the prism change as the sun continues to rise: in a few minutes, red becomes orange, then yellow. But by manually winding the mechanism to adjust the angle of the mirror to compensate for the rising sun, I managed to keep the same band of colours in my field of vision. I thought that this project was coming to an end, but the opportunity to acquire the last stocks of Polaroid film from a production that was then stopped presented itself and I seized it. Often clear in winter, Tokyo mornings saw me bathed in a sea of colour."

- Hiroshi Sugimoto in intoduction to its exhibition in Arles (2013)

This collection of polaroids led to the creation of several limited Hermès carrés, hence this publication of 2012.