Hiroshi Sugimoto

Through his expansive exploration of the possibilities of still images, Hiroshi Sugimoto has created some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time—pictures that are meticulously crafted and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalizingly ambiguous. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is a comprehensive survey of work produced over the past five decades, featuring selections from all of Sugimoto’s major series, as well as lesser-known works that illuminate his innovative, conceptually driven approach to making pictures.
Texts by international writers, artists and scholars?including Geoffrey Batchen, Edmund de Waal, Mami Kataoka, Ralph Rugoff, Lara Strongman and Margaret Wertheim?highlight his work’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into the nature of representation and art, our understanding of time and memory, and the paradoxical character of photography as a medium so well suited to both documenting and invention.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries throughout the world, and his work is held in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; National Gallery, London; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Smithsonian, Washington, DC; and Tate, London, among others. Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City.

In 1997, Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) began a series of photographs of significant works of modernist architecture, intending “to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture.” One of the hallmarks of Sugimoto’s work is his technical mastery of the medium. He makes photographs exclusively with an 8 x 10" view camera, and his silver gelatin prints are renowned for their tonal range, total lack of grain, wealth of detail and overall optical precision. In making the Architecture photographs, however, he inverted his usual process: “Pushing out my old large-format camera’s focal length to twice-infinity ... I discovered that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testing architecture for durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process.”

In this volume, which includes 19 previously unpublished images, the language of architectural modernism is distilled in photographs of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. By virtue of their blurriness and lack of color, the images strip down buildings to their essence, what we might imagine was the architect’s first, pure vision of form. The details of construction and imperfections that are a natural result of a massive, collaborative human undertaking are absent, and instead light and shadow define the forms of these buildings. The Architecture photographs continue the artist’s longstanding investigations of the passage of time and history. Are these monuments to human ingenuity and the power of the industrial age as eternal as they seem?

This edition of Hiroshi Sugimoto's (born 1948) popular photography series is expanded and updated from the out-of-print first edition, including five previously unpublished photographs. For more than 30 years, Sugimoto has traveled the world photographing its seas, producing an extended meditation on the passage of time and the natural history of the earth reduced to its most basic, primordial substances: water and air. Always capturing the sea at a moment of absolute tranquility, Sugimoto has composed all the photographs identically, with the horizon line precisely bifurcating each image. The repetition of this strict format reveals the uniqueness of each meeting of sea and sky, with the horizon never appearing exactly the same way twice. The photographs are romantic yet absolutely rigorous, apparently universal but exceedingly specific. In the introduction Munesuke Mita writes, "It is clear that Sugimoto's Seascapes possess a vitality that stands in contrast to Rothko's last paintings, which took the reductionist passion of modernism—the desire to erase everything—to its extreme."

Hiroshi Sugimoto has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries throughout the world, and his work is held in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; National Gallery, London; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Smithsonian, Washington, DC; and Tate, London, among others. Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City.

At first glance, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographic portrait of King Henry VIII of England is arresting: Sugimoto’s camera has captured the tactility of Henry’s furs and silks, the elaborate embroidery of his doublet, the light reflecting off of each shimmering jewel. The contours of the king’s face are so lifelike that he appears to be almost three-dimensional. It seems as though the 21st-century artist has traveled back in time nearly 500 years to photograph his royal subject.

But Sugimoto’s portraits of historical figures are fictions, at least twice removed from their subjects, made by photographing a wax figure that has been created by a sculptor from either a photographic portrait or a painted one. Sugimoto shoots his subjects in black and white, posing the “sitter” against a black background, amplifying the illusion that we are viewing a contemporary portrait in which the subject has stepped out of history.

This volume presents the photographer’s images of the wax figures alongside a selection of portraits of living subjects and photographs of memento mori. As with his other major bodies of work—Dioramas, Seascapes and Theaters—Sugimoto’s Portraits address the passage of time and history, and question the nature of the “reality” captured by the camera. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Portraits is the fourth in a series of books on Sugimoto’s major bodies of work and presents 70 photographs, 7 of which have never before been published.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) has helped define what it means to be a multidisciplinary contemporary artist, his photographs blurring the lines between photography, painting, installation and architecture. Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City.

Published in an edition of 400 signed and numbered copies, Snow White is a unique collector’s edition book containing 75 artworks by Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948). All of the photographs in Snow White are from his Theaters series and include many of his well-known photographs of classic movie palaces and drive-ins, along with new photographs of Italian opera houses and abandoned theaters. Sugimoto began the Theaters series four decades ago. To make these images, he opens the shutter inside the dark theater (or in the case of the drive-ins, outside at night) for the duration of the movie. The running movie is the only source of light bringing out the architectural details of these spaces. The Disney movie Snow White was running when Sugimoto photographed “Palace Theater, Gary (2015), one of the abandoned theaters that is reproduced here.

In this book, Sugimoto reveals for the first time the movies that were screened when he took these photographs and the exposure time of each photograph. Each artwork in Snow White is accompanied by the name of the movie, its running time and a short text about each written by Sugimoto. The black-and-white photographs are hand-tipped onto the pages and the book is bound in silk cloth. Each copy contains a numbered colophon signed by Sugimoto.

In the late 1970s, as Hiroshi Sugimoto was defining his artistic voice, he posed a question to himself: “Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame?” The answer that came to him: “You get a shining screen.” For almost four decades, Sugimoto has been photographing the interiors of theaters using a large-format camera and no lighting other than the projection of the running movie. He opens the aperture when a film begins and closes it when it ends. In the resulting images, the screen becomes a luminous white box and the ambient light subtly brings forward the rich architectural details of these spaces.

Sugimoto began by photographing the classic movie palaces built in the 1920s and ‘30s, their ornate architectural elements a testament to the cultural importance of the burgeoning movie industry. He continued the series with drive-in theaters. In the last decade, Sugimoto has photographed historic theaters in Europe as well as disused theaters that show the ravages of time. Taken together, these photographs present an extended meditation on the passage of time, a recurring theme in his artwork. Theaters, the third in a series of books on Sugimoto’s art, presents 130 photographs, 21 of which have never before been published.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries throughout the world, and his work is held in numerous public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; National Gallery, London; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Smithsonian, Washington, DC; and Tate, London, among others. Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City.

Cahiers d'Art celebrates the 100th issue of the revue with Hiroshi Sugimoto.

The issue, a true tribute to Sugimoto, is rooted in The World is Dead Today, a story written by Sugimoto for his exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo (2015), in which his photographic works are juxtaposed against his eclectic antiques collection recounting the end of modernity.

Issue No.1 2014 is a rare opportunity to see unpublished works reproduced at the highest standard. Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed Sugimoto for the issue and Akiko Miki, Chief Curator, Palais de Tokyo, has contributed an important text on the artist’s work.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Japan in 1948. A photographer since the 1970s, his work deals with history and temporal existence by investigating themes of time, empiricism, and metaphysics. His primary series include: Seascapes, Theaters, Dioramas, Portraits (of Madame Tussaud’s wax figures), Architecture, Colors of Shadow, Conceptual Forms and Lightning Fields. Sugimoto has received a number of grants and fellowships, and his work is held in the collections of the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of New York, among many others.