Hiroshi Sugimoto Japanese, b. 1948

Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) uses an eight-by-ten-inch view camera and long exposures to photograph time itself. In Theaters, begun in 1976, the shutter remains open for the duration of a feature film, transforming the screen into a blank white rectangle that has absorbed every frame. In Seascapes, begun in 1980, the horizon divides water and sky into precisely equal halves. Repeated across seas around the world, the composition remains constant; only the light and weather change.

Born in Tokyo, Sugimoto earned a degree in politics and sociology from Rikkyo University in 1970 before studying photography at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles. He moved to New York in the mid-1970s, dealing in Japanese antiquities while developing his photographic practice. In Dioramas, begun in 1976 at the American Museum of Natural History, taxidermy displays are photographed so that their artifice assumes the authority of documentary evidence. Flattened into a photograph, Sugimoto has observed, the constructed scene begins to look real. His Portraits of 1994 depict wax figures from Madame Tussauds as though they were painted by Holbein, while the Architecture series, begun in 1997, photographs canonical modernist buildings deliberately out of focus, reducing their forms to something closer to the idea of architecture itself.

Sugimoto works with a large-format view camera and black-and-white film, printing to a tonal depth of unusual richness. His series remain open, with new works added to Dioramas, Theaters, and Seascapes over the course of five decades. The Seascapes adhere to a single rule: the horizon must fall exactly halfway down the frame. Made across the Adriatic, Ionian, Tasman, Caribbean, Baltic, and Arctic waters, the photographs pursue an image stripped of geographical specificity. Underlying the series is the proposition that the sea offers a view that might have appeared unchanged to the first human being.

In The Lightning Fields, begun in 2006, Sugimoto applies an electrical charge of 400,000 volts directly to photographic film, producing images without a camera and extending the experimental possibilities explored in the earliest days of photography by William Henry Fox Talbot. His practice extends well beyond the photographic image. In 2008, he founded the architectural practice New Material Research Laboratory, followed by the Odawara Art Foundation in 2009. Near Odawara, he opened the Enoura Observatory in 2017, a complex of gallery, stage, tea house, and stone garden that took ten years to build. He has also directed and designed for the stage, including At the Hawk’s Well at the Opéra National de Paris in 2019, and works with the Japanese theatrical traditions of Noh and Bunraku.

Sugimoto received the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Art in 1999, the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2001, the Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2009, and Japan’s Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2010. A mid-career retrospective organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and the Mori Art Museum travelled in 2005 and 2006. Time Machine opened at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2023 before travelling to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Sugimoto’s photographs are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim, and the Getty, among many others.