Boden Sea

Perhaps the visual opposite of last week's Tibetan landscape are Hiroshi Sugimoto's renowned seascapes, for example the image of the Boden Sea from 1993 above. With each image offering the same balance of water and sky and a particular play of light and texture, the series is really a study in the subtleties of stillness, the kind that Japanese Zen surely informs. As someone who's mind has perhaps never been this poised, I can nevertheless take in the piece as a possibility, as an illustration of how it could be. And there'd still be the crowded train car.

The series reminds me that an artist finds a landscape and then makes it his own. Sugimoto certainly approached the sea and the darkroom with a vision in mind. What we see is really a combination of the outer and inner image.