No, there is another. The 48 photos of 1,000 Buddha statues at Sanjūsangendō that Hiroshi Sugimoto photographed in 1995 used to be Time Exposed (Buddha Series), and then Sea of Buddha. But those similar-but-not-indentical, life-sized Buddhas, standing in 10 tiered rows, actually flank a monumental seated Buddha, a 1,001st Buddha.
And it turns out Sugimoto photographed that one, too. I think he showed it for the first time last year at Lisson Gallery in LA, and that’s where the shopaholics on the LACMA collectors committee saw it, and bought it. And thus now LACMA says, “Sea of Buddha is a series of 49 photographs that feature 1,001 statues of bodhisattvas at Sanjūsangendō temple in Kyoto.”
Sea of Buddha 049 (Triptych) is somehow listed as being made in 1995. Let’s circle back to that. It is a triptych because it is three gelatin silver prints mounted together, each one an 8-foot tall section of the 12-foot-wide print. [That’s so close to full-size—the seated figure is 11 feet tall–I’m kind of surprised Sugimoto didn’t go for it.]
About that date. Sugimoto actually produced at least two prints of this seated kannon figure before. He made a unique Sea of Buddha installation for an all-Buddha auction at Christie’s during Asia Week 2014 that included six 16×20 Buddha grid photos, and a large-format 28×36-in. lithograph of the seated Buddha. Which is also how it was presented at Lisson.
I’m going to guess that ratio preserves the scale between the sculptures. That lithograph was described as one of two produced—the other in the artist’s collection—from an “intended edition” of five+1AP. Whether it’s considered a continuation of that edition, or its own thing, that sounds to me like the triptych format print did not exist yet.
This Christie’s essay has another, new, extensive account of the circumstances of photographing the Buddhas, emphasizing the natural light at sunrise, and the two weeks of daily 3-hour access, beginning at 5:30. With a rolling ladder for “elevated framing” and a fixed focus and composition, Sugimoto was able to take up to seven images/day before the monks kicked him out.
But this workflow also means that he was not “removing” all the temple’s modernized cruft; he was shooting over it. And he was not “removing” the “fluorescent” lights; he was shooting before the monks turned them on. The 28 carved deity statues on the floor level also do not appear, which is significant, because Sugimoto surely did not have them displaced and replaced 20-28 times. So he shot over those, too. And the focal depth for the first row of Buddhas is different than the third through tenth. Did he do two passes, at two heights—each image shows eight rows, but which eight? Did he leave out the bottom row, which would have been partially obstructed by deity sculptures? Or did shooting down and cropping the Buddhas at their heads solve the problem? Did he and his rig ever cast a shadow across the Buddhas, or did a long exposure erase any human trace?