Renowned Japanese Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto gives the first major solo showcase of his work in the UK.

His photos have been described as 'blurry', 'odd', 'morbid', and 'some of the most mesmerising images ever made'.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 16 August 2002

KIRSTY WARK:
When you stood and looked at the photographs and moved forward and backwards, did you see different things in them?

BONNIE GREER:
I did. I was moved by the exhibit. It seemed to me, to be about imagination and capturing it at the moment when you are creating.

You have something in your mind that is absolutely perfect. It is the way art is supposed to be; your relationship to the piece itself. You have to stand back and actually take in this piece of work, or step up closer and take it in. As a result, you are altered.

I was moved by a piece called the Church of Light. Just at the moment he captures what I felt is what this architect must have felt inside himself, when he was creating this. It is a landscape of the imagination and you have to move yourself in relation to it to get all of it.

KIRSTY WARK:
Dealing with the architecture, did you think the buildings were beautiful when you looked at them?

The modernist buildings lend themselves to this because they are very clear lines that he pushed back.

SIMON ARMITAGE:
The catalogue kept talking about exactness. I do not know what it was in me, I could feel the Philistine coming to the fore, admittedly never that far from the surface, but my eyes were trying to cross to bring these things into focus.

They were blurred and they remained blurred. Another ideological thrust behind the exhibition was timelessness, but it seemed to me that these buildings, which were very much in the picture, are completely marked by their time.

We know from what we have been talking about that the landscape and the horizon of Manhattan is a very temporary thing, yet these things were being presented as being timeless. I couldn't understand the conceit there at all.

IAN RANKIN:
I thought the seascapes were superb. I had a problem similar to Simon, that I couldn't look at the buildings for more than 20 seconds without my eyes crossing, because the brain tells the eye to bring it back into focus, but you can't.

Paintings are more forgiving on that level, you don't mind it being blurry. I had trouble with those, and the fact they are displayed behind glass means all you can see is the fire extinguisher behind you.

KIRSTY WARK:
It is a interesting he puts a mark on his lens to make sure the horizon is absolutely central.

BONNIE GREER:
The concept of the brain is what is supposed to happen, because you are not supposed to take any of these images for granted.

KIRSTY WARK:
Did you not think that you had a sense of the vastness of the sea, of the expanse of water?

BONNIE GREER:
It makes you feel and realise that the majority of the earth is water, the majority of ourselves is water, so this infinitesimal idea and sense was there, without spelling it out.

SIMON ARMITAGE:
Do we need a photograph to remind us of that?

BONNIE GREER:
We don't, but that's the medium he works in.