To create each photograph, Sugimoto positions a large-format camera at the rear of a cinema auditorium and opens the shutter at the precise moment a film begins. The shutter remains open for the duration of the screening—often several hours—before being closed when the final credits end. The resulting image records every frame of the film on a single negative. Because tens of thousands of projected images accumulate onto one surface during the lengthy exposure, the film itself disappears into a radiant white rectangle, leaving only the glowing screen and the architecture of the theatre illuminated by its light.

The photographs are at once documents and abstractions. Individual narratives, characters and scenes vanish, compressed into pure light, while ornate cinema interiors emerge in extraordinary detail. Grand movie palaces, drive-in theatres and later opera houses become silent monuments to collective experience, transformed into contemplative spaces in which past and present, duration and stillness, coexist. As a result, each work functions simultaneously as a portrait of a building, a record of a specific cinematic event and a meditation on the nature of time itself

Sugimoto’s Theaters series explores many of the central concerns that run throughout his artistic practice, including memory, perception, history and the limits of representation. By collapsing an entire film into a single exposure, he challenges conventional notions of photography as a medium that freezes a fleeting moment. Instead, these images contain hours of accumulated time, what Sugimoto has described as “time exposed.” The works invite viewers to consider how experiences are remembered, condensed and transformed through the passage of time.

The luminous white screen at the centre of each composition possesses an almost spiritual presence. Sugimoto himself has described the moment of conceiving the series as mysterious and even religious, imagining the glowing screen emerging from the darkness to illuminate the entire theatre. This sense of transcendence remains central to the photographs, which often evoke themes of absence, infinity and the sublime while transforming ordinary cinemas into spaces of quiet contemplation.

Widely regarded as one of the defining photographic projects of the late twentieth century, Theaters helped establish Sugimoto as one of the most important conceptual photographers of his generation. Through a deceptively simple technical process, the series transforms architecture, cinema and photography into a profound reflection on light, memory and the passage of time, revealing how an entire narrative can be reduced to a single radiant image while still retaining its emotional and cultural power.