Sugimoto's time, on the Riviera

Hiroshi Sugimoto does not photograph moments. He photographs duration. A seascape is a horizon held open for an hour; a Theater is an entire film exposed onto one frame until the screen becomes a rectangle of white light.

The camera is a machine for keeping time, not for stopping it.

Seen on the Riviera — where a century of artists came chasing the light — the work finds a strange rhyme. Matisse cut into colour here; Sugimoto distils it to two greys and a line.

It is the clearest illustration of this atlas's wager: that an idea formed in Japan and an idea formed in France can stand in the same room and explain each other.