Aperture #264: Stop Time

Spanning the years 1637 to 2050, the images featured in Stop Time contemplate photography’s unstable histories and its ability to stretch conventional scales of duration. Essays by Lucy Ives, Brian Dillon, Zoe Lescaze, Brad Bolman, and Sugimoto himself explore the surprising history of camera obscuras, Isaac Newton’s discoveries in optics, environmental time capsules, and the origins and endings of photography. The issue also presents Man Ray’s enigmatic Mathematical Objects photographs, a groundbreaking series that first debuted in Cahiers d’Art in 1936.

A conversation between Sugimoto and Michael Famighetti, Aperture’s editor in chief, is accompanied by new photographs by Daniel Shea, who captures the artist’s New York studio—a cabinet of curiosities in its own right—with perhaps the only darkroom in the world to house a 400,000-volt Van de Graaff generator. Shea’s portrait of Sugimoto graces the issue’s cover. Elsewhere, the photographer Stefan Dotter channels the singular atmosphere of Sugimoto’s Enoura Observatory, a Gesamtkunstwerk and aspiring ruin in Odawara, Japan, devoted to meditations on landscape, human perception, and cosmic time.