(Tokyo, Japan, 1948- )
Lives and works in New York City
This portrait of Yasser Arafat
is part of a project that featured monumental photographs of celebrities
and historical figures, but they are portraits that don’t reveal
their subject as directly as it might first seem. Clearly, this is
a photograph that depicts Arafat, but it is not immediately clear
whether this is a photograph taken directly of Arafat, or a photograph
of a painting. In fact, this image is a photograph of Arafat's figure
at Madame Tussaud's wax museum. The wax figure was, in turn, made
from a previous photograph. In his portrait, Sugimoto has managed
to make Arafat look more real than he did in the photo the statue
was based on. This layering of sources, a photograph of a wax figure
made from a photograph makes this work a portrait of a portrait of
a portrait. It is interesting to note that Arafat was, himself, made
largely from a layering of images and artifice: he was a statesman
without a sovereign state, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who carried
a pistol. Arafat's power was largely based on artifice and ambiguity,
whose sources of political legitimacy were just as nebulous and multi-layered
as the sources of this portrait. |
