Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) 'Prospect Park Theatre, Brooklyn, N.Y.' (The Sanders Theater), 1977 Gelatin silver print, printed later; signed, titled, and editioned '11/25' in pencil on the reverse, framed, Sonnabend Gallery and Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, labels on the reverse. 16 5/8 x 21 1/2 in. (42.2 x 54.6 cm.) sheet 19 7/8 x 23 7/8 in. (50.5 x 60.6 cm.) Footnotes: Provenance Sonnabend Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1997 Note As a young man in his twenties living in New York, Hiroshi Sugimoto found himself fascinated by 'the global currency of perception' and began an exploration of the mechanics of photography and film. In considering the similarities between the experiences of watching a film and dreaming, Sugimoto noted that the line between the two is so indistinguishable that a viewer can lose themself within the moving image - at least for a time. 'I wanted to photograph a movie, with all its appearance of life and motion, in order to stop it again ... I must use photography as a means to shut away the ghosts resurrected by the excess of photographic afterimages. My dream was to capture 170,000 photographs on a single frame of film. The image I had inside my brain was of a gleaming white screen inside a dark movie theater. The light created by an excess of 170,000 exposures would be the embodiment or manifestation of something awe-inspiring and divine; perhaps that something was the 'excess of death.'' (Hiroshi Sugimoto: Theaters, 2016) In 1977, one year after he began his 'Theaters' series, and in the very same city which had inspired the project, Sugimoto selected the crumbling Sanders Theater in Park Slope as his next subject. Drawn to its ornate architecture that had fallen into disrepair, Sugimoto trained his lens on the 50-year-old stage and captured a final view of this iteration of the movie-house - it would permanently close several months later. The theater itself still stands on the corner of Prospect Park, having assumed several identities in the subsequent decades: as the Pavilion Theater in the 1990s and early 2000s, and most recently as the Nitehawk Cinema, which remains open today.  Since the late 1970s, Sugimoto has photographed more than a hundred theaters for this body of work, expanding the project to encompass opera houses, abandoned spaces, and drive-ins. While the scope of his chosen theaters has broadened, Sugimoto reminds us that these hallowed movie-houses are not his ultimate focus; rather, each one is a venue for capturing the ethereal magic of cinema. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing