U.A. Walker, New York, 1978 (From the Theaters series)

U.A. Walker, New York, 1978 is part of Sugimoto's celebrated Theaters series, capturing the luminous architecture of historic American picture palaces. By positioning his large-format camera at the center of the auditorium with the shutter left open for the entire duration of the feature film, Sugimoto collapses temporal duration into a single luminous rectangle. The glowing movie screen acts as a radiant light source, burning away the moving images into a brilliant white void while casting ghostly, theatrical illumination across ornate neo-baroque moldings, proscenium arches, and vacant seats.

This long-exposure technique transforms commercial cinema spaces into haunting, sacred cathedrals of light and shadow, exploring themes of memory, ephemerality, and the passage of time. The glowing screen functions metaphorically as a repository of collective cinematic dreams, accumulating hours of projected light into a monolithic blank slate that questions the physical reality of the moving image.