I got an email in July about this symposium and from the beginning, I wondered. 20 people talking about Hiroshi Sugimoto – will this work? In September, Matthias told us about the format: a series of informal presentations followed by responses. He told us about the show, about the Tadao Ando building. The light, he kept saying, wait until we saw how the light moved around the galleries. He assured us it would be an amazing experience – this dialog between the art and the architecture, and with the sculpture outside and the photographs of the sculpture adding yet another layer. I think I remember him asking us to trust him. Then there was that article in The New York Times, photographs of a sculpture in the courtyard of a gallery being shown in the gallery and published in a book with a story about the sculpture…Will this work? Even on the plane, people wanted to know what they were getting into. What was it about Joe? What was it about this space? About this space and these photographs together?

People trickled in all day Friday. It was warm and hazy. Some joined us in the parking lot of the St. Louis Art Museum where we stood listening to Fabian talk about Richard Serra’s To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted. Where is the Serra? Someone whispered. Oh, someone replied, we’re standing on it. Others arrived, bags in hand, at the Photography and Print Room. Eric had Sugimoto’s Radio City Music Hall on one of the stands and people seemed to pause before it – as if to acknowledge that there was more to come, to shake hands and accept the dare. Outside the museum, wedding parties posed for photographs. We climbed into our van, and someone started a count. Others kept track of the colors of the bridesmaid dresses. I think by the time we got back to the hotel, we’d counted six and fuchsia seemed to be popular. We had an hour and it would begin.

That evening we wandered around the gallery looking at the photographs. They were larger than I expected, unframed, and luridly naked to the air. And those tones – they weren’t blacks or whites, but something else. Perhaps it was because they were so large and slightly blurry that I was drawn in close to the areas where there was nothing at all. The chemicals seemed to be still alive there in the paper, murmuring amongst themselves, debating their offerings of brown blacks and blue blacks and whites so white you wondered if you were just looking at the paper itself. In the photographs, I thought I saw an object or I thought maybe I was seeing time itself or maybe just the weather. I thought of Talbot’s early calotypes of the roof of his house. September 22, 1840: 5 minutes, cloudy. September 24th, 1840: 3 minutes, cloudy. Object, time, weather.

Every once in a while there would be a cloud and you realized you were looking at something concrete, something somewhere outside, something big. Someone sensed the collective restlessness and called out – can we go out and see Joe? Keys were retrieved, doors unlocked. Down the short steps, and we stepped onto the gravel.

The buildings hummed around us. A water tower on a tall building blinked through a series of lights. There was a half moon. Other surrounding buildings were dramatically lit, heightening the sight and silence of Joe down there in the gravel. The gravel parted beneath my feet. From this side, I was confident. I always think I can imagine how things end. I entered the fold. The first steps were easy, but then it seemed that gradually the space above your head was radically disappearing, or that maybe the walls were narrowing. The person in front of me quickly disappeared and I wanted to inch along. I felt like I was stumbling, but I couldn’t tell if the disorientation was because of something that was physically happening or because of something that I was seeing. There were sounds of surprise, gasps, whoas. It was like being lost for a moment, nearly panicking as the mind and body jostled for some sort of common tether. You felt the urge to look at the sky for direction, finding only blue, a blue that seemed impossibly close. Finally to the other side, and into the moonlit center, and I wondered for a moment, to where I had come.