The Cleveland Museum of Art Member Magazine
Summer 2003
Landscapes of the Mind

By Tom E. Hinson, Curator of Photography

Cleveland photographer Masumi Hayashi creatively responds to the splendor and beauty of ancient Indian temples in her large-scale color photograph collages. These intricate, multi-image panoramas capture the artistic ambition, skill, sensuous form, and layered content of the art of India so evident in this summer's major exhibition, The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India. Generally excluding people in her images, Hayashi emphasized architecture and sculpture rather than the role of temples as tourist destinations or active places of worship.

Hayashi's complex procedure begins by determining the amount of space to cover-left to right and top to bottom-and then focusing the camera on the horizon line, which establishes the mid-section of the collage. It is this band of prints that contains the least distortion, providing a touchstone for the rest of the composition. She angles her camera up and down to each new horizontal position until she has taken the number of shots necessary to complete her panoramic view. In the exhibited works, the horizontal span can range from roughly 240 degrees to 180 degrees, from immediately in front of the tripod to directly above the artist's head. She has described her method as "a way of remapping space in a way ordinary vision doesn't allow up to see."

A slight, intentional overlapping becomes pronounced as the camera angle moves away from the horizon line. The farther away from the center, the more abstract the image becomes, and as Hayashi moves from the midline each shot repeats more of the one before. This distortion is reminiscent of a cubist rendering of space, enhanced by the variance in tonal quality from print to print caused by changing atmospheric conditions during her lengthy shoots. Her sequential process results in the photograph's unusually rich surface pattern, which can cause a feeling of disorientation or vertigo.

A professor of art at Cleveland State University since 1982, Hayashi has garnered an international reputation for her distinctive style in photographing subjects such as abandoned prisons, EPA Superfund sites, and Japanese-American internment camps, with their attendant social and political contexts. In 1996, while in Japan for her exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, she spent a week photographing temples. This was the start of her continuing interest in depicting sites of ancestral worship-ancient and present-day. At the end of 1999, Hayashi made the first of four trips to India with the support of the Ohio Arts Council. She recently completed a four-month tour of India and Nepal funded by a Fulbright Research Fellowship. Meeting many logistical challenges, she has photographed throughout India, propelled by an inquiring mind and an insatiable eye for detail. The resulting images are as expansive and extraordinary as the subjects she has chosen to record.