Hall of Thirty Three Bays

In 1995, Hiroshi Sugimoto made a series of photographs inside a famed medieval Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, called Sanjusangendo, or the Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. The temple houses 1,000 standing statues of the bodhisattva Kannon, a compassionate being dedicated to helping others along the path to enlightenment. Each intricate, gilt wooden statue of Kannon is slightly different. Over several days, working at dawn with his large-format camera, Sugimoto photographed all 1,000 statues. The statues of Kannon stand on tiered rows that run along one side of the temple, and Sugimoto composed each image to show only the deity’s subtly varied faces. The full series includes 48 images, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth are included in the Smart Museum’s collection. The statues at the edges of each image overlap from one to the next, but otherwise each photograph contains a different set of Kannons.