August 17th

August 17th uses a calendar date as its title — a strategy that frames the print as a record of a specific day rather than as a generalised seasonal image. In Japan, mid-August falls within the period around Obon, when the heat is at its most settled and the year reaches a kind of quiet, suspended high summer; the work's tagging as a summer print is consistent with this reading. Rather than the conventional summer signs of classical Japanese printmaking — fireworks, festivals, cooling waters — Sugimoto's etching is more likely to register the day through observed light, an interior, or an object encountered at that moment. Etching's tonal range, from open whites to dense bitten blacks, allows the heavy, motionless quality of late-summer afternoon to be carried by aquatint and plate tone. The dated title aligns the print with the diaristic strand in his practice and in the broader post-2020 Tokyo Geidai cohort, which has frequently used the format of the daily entry — observed, undramatised, specific — as a structuring principle for image-making.