is a Japanese photographer and architect. He leads the Tokyo-based architectural firm New Material Research Laboratory.
Early life and education Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. He reportedly took his earliest photographs in high school, photographing film footage of Audrey Hepburn as it played in a movie theater.Hiroshi Sugimoto Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 1970, Sugimoto studied politics and sociology at Rikkyō University in Tokyo. In 1974, he retrained as an artist and received his BFA at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. Afterwards, Sugimoto settled in New York City. He soon started working as a dealer of Japanese antiquities in Soho.Elisa Lipsky-Karasz (11 September 2013), Hiroshi Sugimoto's Fossil Inspiration Wall Street Journal
Photography Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of 'time exposed',Mateusz Palka (2 June 2016), Photographs of the stolen view. Issues of time in works of Hiroshi Sugimoto. or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death.
The conceptual and philosophical aspects of Sugimoto's work are deeply influenced by the writings and works of Marcel Duchamp, as well as the Dadaist and Surrealist movements as a whole. He has also expressed a great deal of interest in late 20th century modern architecture.
His use of an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures has garnered Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of highly skilled technical ability.
Dioramas, In Praise of Shadows and Portraits Sugimoto began his work with Dioramas in 1976, a series in which he photographed displays in natural history museums. (A polar bear on a fake ice floe contemplates his fresh-killed seal; vultures fight over carrion in front of painted skies; exotic monkeys hoot in a plastic jungle.)Blake Gopnik (20 February 2006), Hiroshi Sugimoto, Emphasizing the Play Of Shadow and Lie Washington Post. Initially the pictures were shot at the American Museum of Natural History, a place he returned to later for dioramas in 1982, 1994, and 2012.Randy Kennedy (8 October 2012), 'Fossilizing' With a Camera New York Times. Many of the earlier silver gelatin prints – including Polar Bear (1976), his first photograph from the Diorama series – present animals. The assumption that cameras show reality tricks many viewers into assuming the animals in the photos are real until they examine the pictures carefully. His later work in 2012 – including Mixed Deciduous Forest and Olympic Rain Forest – focus on natural landscapes rather than diorammas.Hiroshi Sugimoto: Still Life, May 9 – June 28, 2014 Pace Gallery, New York.
In Praise of Shadows (1998) is a series of photographs based on Gerhard Richter's paintings of burning candles.
His series Portraits, begun as a commission by the Deutsche Guggenheim in 1999,Snapshot: 'Catherine Parr' (1999) by Hiroshi Sugimoto Financial Times, 10 August 2012. returns to the idea of reality in photography. In that series, Sugimoto photographed wax figures of Henry VIII and his wives based on portraits from the 16th century. When taking the picture, Sugimoto attempted to recreate the lighting that would have been used by the painter. Using Madame Tussaud's in London and Amsterdam, as well as a wax museum in Ito, Japan, Sugimoto used 8-by-10-inch negatives to take three-quarter view photos of the wax figures. They were typically shot against a black background.Katherine Roth (10 September 2001), Framing a Snapshot in Time Los Angeles Times.
Theatres In 1978, Sugimoto created the Theatres seriesBelting, Hans and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Theatres. Koln: Sonnabend Sundell Editions and Eyestorm, 2006. . by photographing old American movie palaces and drive-ins with a folding 4x5 camera and tripod. His approach was to open the camera shutter and expose the film for the duration of the entire feature-length movie, the film projector providing the sole lighting. The luminescent screen in the centre of the composition, the architectural details, and the seats of the theatre are the only subjects that register owing to the long exposure of each photograph. The lighting gives the works a surreal look, and continues Sugimoto's attempt to reveal time in photography.Peter Yeoh (2010). "Capturing Light – Hiroshi Sugimoto reveals the essence of his life's work". Glass Magazine (2): 174–179. ISSN 2041-6318 Sugimoto discovered that "Different movies give different brightnesses. If it's an optimistic story, I usually end up with a bright screen; if it's a sad story, it's a dark screen. Occult movie? Very dark."Belting, Hans and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Theatres.
Seascapes In 1980 he began working on an ongoing series of photographs of the sea and its horizon, Seascapes, in locations all over the world. He used an old-fashioned large-format camera to make exposures of varying duration (up to three hours).David Pagel (18 December 1997), A Focus on Tranquillity Los Angeles Times.Hiroshi Sugimoto: 7 Days / 7 Nights, November 6, 2008 – February 14, 2009 Gagosian Gallery, New York. The locations varied widely and included the English Channel, Cliffs of Moher"North Atlantic Ocean, Cliffs of Moher," Hiroshi Sugimoto 1989.Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/267005.html, the Arctic Ocean, Positano, the Tasman Sea, the Norwegian Sea at Vesterålen, and the Black Sea at Ozuluce in Turkey. The black-and-white pictures are all exactly the same size, bifurcated exactly in half by the horizon line.William Wilson (4 March 1994), Sugimoto's Sea of Meditation at MOCA Los Angeles Times. The systematic nature of Sugimoto's project recalls the work Sunrise and Sunset at Praiano by Sol LeWitt, in which he photographed sunrises and sunsets over the Tyrrhenian Sea off Praiano on the Amalfi Coast.Charles Hagen (21 February 1992), ART IN REVIEW; Hiroshi Sugimoto New York Times.
Architecture works In 1995, Sugimoto photographed the Sanjūsangen-dō ("Hall of Thirty-Three Bays") in Kyoto. In special preparation for the shoot, he had all late-medieval and early-modern embellishments removed, and the contemporary fluorescent lighting turned off.Sea of Buddhas (1995) Hiroshi Sugimoto. Shot from a high vantage point and editing out all architectural features, the resulting 48 photographs concentrate on the bodhisattvas – 1,000 life-size and almost identical gilded figures carved from wood in the 12th and 13th centuries, that are banked up inside the building.John Russell (7 December 1995), PHOTOGRAPHY VIEW; Radiant Wonders of the Mid-Century World New York Times.
In 1997, on a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Sugimoto began producing series of large-format photographs of notable buildings around the world. In 2003, the museum showed the series in a sepulchral installation, with the pictures installed on layered rows of dark-painted partitions.Holland Cotter (17 October 2003), ART IN REVIEW; Hiroshi Sugimoto – 'Architecture' New York Times. Sugimoto's later Architecture series (2000–03) consists of blurred images of well-known examples of Modernist architecture.Hiroshi Sugimoto Guggenheim Collection.
In 2001, Sugimoto traveled the length of Japan, visiting the so-called meisho "famous sites" for pines: Miho no Matsubara, Matsushima, and Amanohashidate.Pine Trees (2001) Hiroshi Sugimoto. On the royal palace grounds in Tokyo, Sugimoto photographed a pine landscape, copying a traditional 16th-century Japanese ink-painting style.Ann Wilson Lloyd (11 February 2001), The Hall of Mirrors Meets the House of Wax New York Times. Specifically, the Shōrin-zu byōbu (Pine Forest Screens) (ca. 1590) by Momoyama period painter, Hasegawa Tōhaku (1539–1610), represent a coming of age in Japanese imaging.
Joe In July 2003 Sugimoto travelled to St. Louis to photograph the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, designed by Tadao Ando whose work he had portrayed various times before. Instead, he photographed Richard Serra's sculpture Joe in an outdoor courtyard at dawn and at dusk for five days.Andrew Blum (17 September 2006), Art Capturing Art Capturing Art Capturying ... New York Times. The resulting Joe series was made using short exposure, producing a blurring effect from Sugimoto's unconventional use of the flexibility of the large format camera. He set the distance between the lens and the film to half the focal length, in his words "twice-infinity".Hiroshi Sugimoto, Architecture Sugimoto gave the photographs serial numbers from his Architecture series. The hand-developed gelatin silver photographs are mounted on aluminum panels but are otherwise unframed, unglazed, and unlaminated to draw attention to what Sugimoto describes as the "transformation from the three-dimensional steel source sculpture to the thin layers of what I would call my 'silver sculpture'."Hiroshi Sugimoto: Joe, September 9 – October 14, 2006 Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles. When the Pulitzer Arts Foundation decided to publish a book about the series, Sugimoto asked Jonathan Safran Foer to write a text to accompany the nineteen selected photographs.
Other notable series and collaborations A 2004 series consisted of large photographs depicting antique mathematical and mechanical models, which Sugimoto came across in Tokyo and shot from slightly below.Michael Kimmelman (27 May 2005), ART IN REVIEW; Hiroshi Sugimoto New York Times. The mathematical forms – stereometric models in plaster – were created in the 19th century to provide students with a visual understanding of complex trigonometric functions. The mechanical forms – machine models including gears, pumps and regulators – are industrial tools used to demonstrate basic movements of modern machinery. Sugimoto began working on this series as a response to The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) by Marcel Duchamp.Hiroshi Sugimoto: Conceptual Forms, April 7 – May 28, 2005 Gagosian Gallery, London.
For the series Stylized Sculpture (2007), Sugimoto selected distinctive garments by celebrated couturiers from the collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute. Headless mannequins were shot in chiaroscuro—including Madeleine Vionnet's T-dress, Balenciaga's ensemble, Yves St Laurent's Mondrian shift, and Issey Miyake's slip.Rodin – Sugimoto, February 11 – March 25, 2011 Gagosian Gallery, Paris.
For his 2009 series Lightning Fields, Sugimoto abandoned the use of the camera, producing photographs using a 400,000 volt Van de Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto the film. Instead of placing an object on photo-sensitive paper, then exposing it to light, he produced the image by causing electrical sparks to erupt over the surface of a 7-by-2.5-foot sheet of film laid on a large metal tabletop.Carol Kino (11 November 2010), Stealing Mother Nature's Thunder New York Times. The highly detailed results combine bristling textures and branching sparks to create evocative images.
In 2009 U2 selected Sugimoto's Boden Sea, Uttwil (1993) as the cover for their album No Line on the Horizon to be released in March that year. This image had previously been used by sound artists Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree for their 2006 CD inspired by Sugimoto's Seascapes series.Is the New U2 Album Cover a Rip-off? Retrieved 19 January 2009 Sugimoto noted it was merely a "coincidence" that the image appears on both album covers. In addition, he notes that the agreement with U2 was a "stone age deal" or, artist-to-artist. No cash exchanged hands, rather a barter agreement which allows Sugimoto to use the band's song "No Line on the Horizon" (partly inspired by the "Boden Sea" image) in any future project.Photographer Sugimoto strikes a Stone Age deal with U2. The Japan Times. Retrieved 18 November 2010