Hiroshi Sugimoto (杉本博司, Sugimoto Hiroshi), born on February 23, 1948, is a Japanesephotographer currently dividing his time between Tokyo, Japan and New York City, USA. His catalogue is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes.
Work
Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, 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.
Sugimoto is also 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 have garnered Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He is equally acclaimed for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work.
Dioramas 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.) Initially the pictures were shot at the American Museum of Natural History, a place he returned for later dioramas in 1982, 1994, and 2012. The cultural assumption that cameras always show us reality tricks many viewers into assuming the animals in the photos are real until they examine the pictures carefully. His series Portraits, begun in 1999, is based on a similar idea. In that series, Sugimoto photographs wax figures of Henry VIII and his wives. These wax figures are based on portraits from the 16th century and when taking the picture Sugimoto attempts to recreate the lighting that would have been used by the painter. Focusing on Madame Tussaud's in London, its branch in Amsterdam and a wax museum in Ito, Japan, Sugimoto took three-quarter view photos, using 8-by-10-inch negatives, of the most realistic wax figures. They are typically taken against a black background.
Theatres
Begun in 1978, Sugimoto's Theatres series involved photographing old American movie palaces and drive-ins with a folding 4x5 camera and tripod, opening his camera shutter and exposing 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 in the photographs, and the unique lighting gives the works a surreal look, as a part of Sugimoto's attempt to reveal time in photography.
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, using an old-fashioned large-format camera to make exposures of varying duration (up to three hours). The locations range from theEnglish Channel to the Arctic Ocean, from Positano, Italy, to the Tasman Sea and from the Norwegian Sea at Vesterålen to 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. 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 ocean off Praiano, Italy, on the Amalfi Coast.
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, as well as having the contemporary fluorescent lighting turned off. 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.
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. Sugimoto's later Architecture series (2000–03) consists of blurred images of well-known examples of Modernist architecture.
In 2001, Sugimoto traveled the length of Japan, visiting the so-called meisho "famous sites" for pines: Miho no Matsubara,Matsushima, Amanohashidate. On the royal palace grounds in Tokyo, Sugimoto photographed a pine landscape, copying a traditional 16th-century Japanese ink-painting style. Listed as Japanese national treasures, the Shorinzu-byobu (Pine Forest Screens) (ca. 1590) by Momoyama period (1568 1600) 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 Foundation for the Arts, designed by Tadao Ando whose work he had portrayed various times before. However, his ended up photographing Richard Serra’s sculpture Joe (the first in his “Torqued Spiral” series), which rests in an outdoor courtyard, at dawn and at dusk for five days. The resulting Joe series was made with short exposure. The blurring effect results from Sugimoto's unconventional use of the camera's infinity function, where he forces his camera to focus on an imaginary "twice-infinity" spot. Sugimoto gave the photographs serial numbers from his Architecture series. Significantly, 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'." When the Pulitzer Foundation decided to publish a book about the series, Sugimoto asked Jonathan Safran Foer, whom he had met years earlier, to write a text to accompany the nineteen selected photographs.
A 2004 series comprises large photographs of antique mathematical and mechanical models, which Sugimoto came across in Tokyo and shot from slightly below. 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.
For the series Stylized Sculpture (2007), Sugimoto selected distinctive garments by celebrated couturiers from the collection of theKyoto Costume Institute, shot in chiaroscuro on headless mannequins—from Madeleine Vionnet’s precociously modern T-dress andBalenciaga’s wasp-waisted billowing ensemble to Yves St Laurent’s strict geometric Mondrian shift and Issey Miyake’s sail-like slip.
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 on surface of a 7-by-2.5-foot sheet of film laid on a large metal tabletop. The highly detailed results combine bristling textures and branching sparks into highly evocative images.
Recent work
Sugimoto is also an accomplished architect. He approaches all of his work from many different perspectives, and architecture is one component that he uses to design the settings for his exhibitions. His recent projects include an architectural commission at Naoshima Contemporary Art Center in Japan, for which Sugimoto designed and built a Shinto shrine. He also gets involved with the performance art occurring beside them. This allows him to frame his works precisely the way he wants to.
| “ | I try to never be satisfied; this way I will always be challenging my spirit. | ” |
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. 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.
In 2009, Sugimoto acquired some rare negatives made by Henry Fox Talbot in the 1840s and retrieved through an intensely fragile process what "looks remarkably like Plato's shadows in the cave". The works of Sugimoto's All Five Elements series (2011) consist of optical quality glass with black and white film. On the occasion of Art Basel in 2012, Sugimoto presented Couleurs de l'Ombre, 20 different colorful scarf designs in editions of just seven, all created - using a new inkjet printing method - for French fashion label Hermès.
