Seated in the round under the monumental Ellsworth Kelly at the base of the staircase with nearly two-dozen art historians and curators, I couldn’t help but notice how dramatically the institutional frame of the Pulitzer Foundation shaped my understanding of Sugimoto’s Photographs of Joe. Elizabeth Smith (Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago) started off the symposium by addressing a related question: what is the "institutional logic" of Sugimoto’s exhibitions? It quickly became clear the artist’s approach to exhibitions is no simple matter. Smith showed us images of an installation of Sugimoto’s photographs of well-known architectural landmarks (such as the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings) in which each photograph hung on a freestanding, specially constructed panel. From the entrance of the exhibition space, only the empty sides of the panels were visible, a view which Sugimoto intended to subtly suggest skyscrapers. I had the feeling that this was not an innocent maneuver on Sugimoto’s part. In a sense, Sugimoto “conquered” the pantheon of famous architects by capturing their monumental structures in the fragile, temporal medium of photography and suspending them on his own architectural surrogates. The double meaning of photography’s ability to “capture” (ie. to represent, but also to take over) its subject seemed equally at play in the Photographs of Joe installation. As art historian Carol Armstrong remarked, at the Pulitzer there was a tension, even in an outright conflict, between the nearly dematerialized presence of the photographs and the massive physicality of the Serra sculpture outside. The more I looked at the exhibition, the more this seemed to be Sugimoto’s deliberate strategy. Serra’s sculpture invites touch, while the unframed photograph’s immaculate surface seemed as if it would disappear if you so much as breathed on it. The delicacy of the prints played off the unfathomable weightiness of steel. Walking through the Serra is an experience of continuous and controlled time, while the dispersion of Sugimoto’s photographs throughout the building induced a sense of discontinuity and displacement. Throughout the day, we found ourselves moving back and forth between the Sugimotos and the Serra several times. I found myself increasingly seeing the Serra through the Sugimoto lens, occasionally attempting to locate the angles and shadows from the photographs, an absorbing, if somewhat futile, game.

There is second sense in which Photographs of Joe responds to its institutional context. The very names Pulitzer, Serra and Ando have become institutions in and of themselves. With this series, Sugimoto’s own name acquires a certain aura by association. In this regard, the discussion of the tendency of artists to self-mythologize was particularly lively. Deborah Kao, in discussing her experience interviewing Sugimoto, reflected on how the artist deliberately spins his own trajectory. Sugimoto places Photographs of Joe in a linear narrative of his career in which this series may be a coda to his photographic practice. (He has suggested a potential turn to earthworks and other large-scale spatial projects.) The veracity of this narrative was up for debate—what better way to stimulate interest in a series of photographs than to hint that these might be the last? Part of the symposium discussion touched on the commercial afterlife of the photographs, which are editions that can be exhibited elsewhere, and sold as individual prints. I imagine that once the works no longer stand in a physical relationship with the Serra sculpture and the Pulitzer building, the photographs (which individually have numbers, not names) will appear seductive yet impersonal.