Sugimoto Photography, Bio, Ideas

"Every time I see the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing."

1 of 16

"One day, standing atop a lone island peak in a remote sea, the horizon encompassing my entire field of vision, for a moment I was floating in the centre of a vast basin. But then, as I viewed the horizon encircle me, I had a distinct sensation of the earth as a watery globe, a clear vision of the horizon not as an endless expanse but the edge of an oceanic sphere."

2 of 16

"In my dreams as a child, I often floated in midair. Sometimes I'd leave my body and watch my sleeping self from on high near the ceiling. Like a out-of-body projection perhaps, a waking self coexisting simultaneously with a sleeping self. Even as an adult, I habitually imagine myself airborne. Might this be at the root of my artistic spirit?"

3 of 16

"I somehow feel we are nearing an era when religion and art will once again cast doubts upon science, or else an era when things better seen through to a scientific conclusion will bow to religious judgment."

4 of 16

" I became interested in seascapes because they relate to memories from my infancy: the very earliest thing I can picture is the sea."

5 of 16

"The sea reminds me that within my blood remain traces of human evolution over hundreds of thousands of years."

6 of 16

"A sharp horizon line and a cloudless sky - here began my consciousness."

7 of 16

"Whenever I stand on a cliff looking at the sea, I envision an infinite beyond. The horizon lies within bounds and the imagination stretches to infinity."

8 of 16

"With deity or Buddha both vanished from this day and age, in what can I take refuge? Just perhaps the only object of devotion I have left is the origin of my consciousness, the sea."

9 of 16

"Japanese novelist Jun'ichiro Tanizaki disdained the "violent" artificial light wrought by modern civilization. I, too, am an anachronist: rather than live at the cutting edge of the contemporary, I feel more at ease in the absent past."

10 of 16

"The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes."

11 of 16

"In Japanese cultural tradition, the act of emulating works of great predecessors is called honka-dori, taking up the melody. Not looked down upon as mere copying, it is regarded as a praiseworthy effort. Thus I thought to enter Tohaku's Shorinzu, metabolizing its inner life so as to offer up my own 'ink photography'."

12 of 16

"As an artist, I wanted to give zero a shape. To make zero - which has no physical existence - visible, I decided to craft an object that went right to the very blink of zero. I sought to give physical form to a three-dimensional mathematical function, the equation for which becomes zero at its zenith."

13 of 16

"I imagine my vision then try to make it happen, just like painting, (...). The reality is there, but how to make it like my reality."

14 of 16

"It was my goal to visualise the ancient layer of human memory with the means of photography"

15 of 16

"I wanted to recreate those ancient festivals and stone monuments as art in order to re-experience the spirituality of ancient peoples."

16 of 16

Summary of Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto's work has achieved widespread recognition for its exploration of abstract concepts, such as time, vision and belief, through meticulously balanced images that encourage prolonged attention and serve to focus audience consideration on the ways in which humanity makes sense of itself. He was heavily influenced by his involvement with New York's Minimal and Conceptual art scenes in the late 1970s and the degree to which he used the camera as a means of engaging with ideas played a significant role in expanding photography beyond documentary uses. His best-known series draw heavily upon repetition, unifying disparate locations through shared compositions, and are characterized by use of long exposures, black and white film, and analog processes. In recent years, Sugimoto has begun to design architectural spaces that, like his photographs, use simplicity of form to focus attention on the mechanisms through which we understand the world.

Accomplishments

Sugimoto aims to create suspended states through pausing or altering the way the passage of time is represented. This separation encourages audiences to observe the world from a removed perspective, distancing familiar concepts and environments and stimulating a form of focused attention that can be likened to the scientific study of specimens removed from their environment. Sugimoto believes that the camera can make visible that which the eye cannot see, most notably including time itself and the emotional effects of space.
The history of photography strongly informs Sugimoto's work. The artist works with 19^th- and early-20^th-century techniques in creating images, often using a large-format wooden camera and always mixing chemicals and developing prints by hand, but also engages with the ideas and traditions that interested early photographers including dioramas, wax figures, and various mechanisms for registering light. The palpability of this lineage in Sugimoto's images serves to anchor his exploration of abstract themes in a concrete tradition. This sense of artistic continuity serves to position Sugimoto's ideas as contributions to an ongoing dialogue and as an evolution in photographic thought.
Sugimoto's reference points and subjects draw from his experiences in the United States of America, Europe, and Japan and his repetition of image compositions, as in the Theatres or Seascapes, serve to unify different times and places. Sugimoto's interest in images that transcend geographic and temporal conditions can be connected to his childhood experiences and to his ongoing interest in abstract concepts such as belief, vision, and culture. As he has matured, Sugimoto's interest in traditional Japanese culture has become more pronounced in his work.

Biography of Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. Reflecting on childhood memories, Sugimoto feels he gathered images and sensations that he would later explore through art. Sugimoto was moved by specific subjects, such as the view of the horizon across the ocean seen through the window of a train (which he recalls from age five), and he discovered new ways to look at the world, imagining himself from alternate perspectives, including from the ceiling of a room. This interest in creating distance between the viewer and everyday life through shifts in perspective can be seen across many of Sugimoto's later works. Sugimoto was given his father's Mamiya 6 camera when he was twelve and began experimenting with it as a teenager; he would photograph Audrey Hepburn on screen as her movies played at the local theatre.

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Progression of Art

Artwork Images

1976

Polar Bear

Polar Bear is amongst the earliest images in Sugimoto's Dioramas series (1976 - 2012), most of which were taken at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The image portrays a bear in an arctic landscape paused above the body of a seal and is deliberately constructed, with use of reflectors to capture the texture of fur and careful calibration of exposure time to isolate the white shades of bear and backdrop, so that the scene appears real. Sugimoto's photographs of dioramas provoke a questioning of the ways in which museums display natural history, suspending time through images in which the slippage between the wild and the artificial becomes palpable. Sugimoto creates his work with a large-format wooden camera and photographs in black and white, developing the images according to the recipes of Ansel Adams, furthering the illusion of the diorama as he removes the artificial colors of the painted backdrop.

This image, like Sugimoto's work more broadly, is closely involved with the history of photography and notions of time in relation to and apart from human history. The diorama, as a means of presenting the world, became popular in the late-19^th century, in the same period in which photography began to be lauded for its scientific accuracy, and both technologies derived power from their ability to capture and preserve specific moments. Sugimoto's major contribution to visual art lies in the craft with which he uses the camera's relationship to time and its capacity for illusion to focus our attention on ways in which humans makes sense of the natural world. Sugimoto has continued exploring the concepts central to the Dioramas series in other works, including Portraits (1999 - present), which takes another 19^th-century technology, the wax figure, as a subject.

Gelatin Silver Print - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Artwork Images

1982

Ligurian Sea, Saviore

The Seascapes series (1980 - present) continues Sugimoto's investigation of time in relation to history and to photography itself. Ligurian Sea, Saviore shows water and air bisected by the horizon, captured in black and white in a long exposure. The image offers no trace of the vantage point from which the photograph was taken, leading the viewer to feel as if they are suspended, floating, between sea and sky. Sugimoto's Seascapes are all composed in this manner, drawing upon the horizon as a point of orientation across cultures and across time. The format serves to unify disparate locations, positioning the sea as at once universal and singular; each image conforms to a type that allows specificity. In Ligurian Sea, Saviore, the sea and sky appear indistinct, as if enveloped in fog, with only close scrutiny revealing the darker grey of the horizon line and a hint of the ripples of the water in the foreground.

Seascapes is deeply conceptual and Sugimoto has written that this work comes out of his understanding of the ocean as an expanse that has lasted through millennia, connecting us with a past that precedes recorded history, and his contemplation of the ways in which a camera can capture what the eye cannot. In the images, which are created with exposures of between 1/30 of a second and several hours, time serves to abstract the landscape, and the only indication of a human presence is in the names that the images are given, which act as a record of the ways in which people make sense of the ineffable through concepts such as naming. The photographs from this series are usually displayed in groups of three, further emphasizing the universality of the ocean.

Gelatin Silver Print - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Artwork Images

2004

Color of Shadows, 1015

The Color of Shadows series (2004) can be seen as indicative of Sugimoto's desire to push his investigations to their limits, involving elaborate staging in pursuit of a seemingly simple study of the effects of light. Color of Shadows, 1015, depicts a white corridor leading to a white wall, with only the hint of wooden floorboards at the lower edge of the frame disrupting the ascetic space. The image's formal definition is provided by the tones and colors of shadow, with blocks and gradations creating depth and visual interest. Sugimoto's vision for the project required him to redesign the interior of a hilltop penthouse, surfacing the walls in shikkui, a Japanese plaster which absorbs and reflects light evenly. The subsequent photographs record the light and shadows at different angles, exposures, and times of day, directing attention to the volumes and corners of the space's architecture.

This series, like others by Sugimoto that take modern and contemporary architecture as subject, can be seen as a new phase in his engagement with physical space and the history of photography. The photographic image, at its most basic, is formed by light registering on a surface, and Sugimoto's series returns the viewer to this principle, explicitly directing attention to the formal qualities of shadow. Sugimoto's images of austere, formally pure interiors strip away superfluous detail, creating a suspended state in which it is the play of light and shadow that connect the world of the image with the world outside. Sugimoto's camera captures the ephemeral and allows us to contemplate it at a duration and with a remove which would otherwise be impossible. The value of Color of Shadows, 1015 is dependent upon the viewer's intuitive appreciation of subtle gradations of tone and color and, in this, can be considered as a commentary on the way in which we are emotionally moved by the elements that sustain earth, including light.

Pigment Print - Private Collection

Artwork Images

2006

Surface of Revolution with Constant Negative Curvature

Surface of Revolution with Constant Negative Curvature is an object representing a mathematical equation. This is one of a group that Sugimoto created and later photographed in a series entitled Mathematical Models (2005 - 2015); the photographs are usually displayed alongside the model, though each object is an independent work of art itself. In order to create the piece, Sugimoto input equations into a computer in order to map the physical sculpture before producing it. The reflective aluminum forms a circular disk at the base, which stretches upward at the center, narrowing toward a vanishing point. In transforming the equation into a physical object, Sugimoto brings to reality an abstract, philosophical idea.

This work springs from Sugimoto's interest in the history of science and his ongoing questions on the nature of representation. The object refers to the theories of Isaac Newton and the works of artisans in the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries who attempted to represent concepts of geometry through objects, but also introduces an element of doubt, producing an object that transforms the equation into a sculpture, suggesting at once the beauty of mathematics and the power of art, and modern technology, to transform and transcend classical science.

Object in Aluminum - Private Collection

Artwork Images

2010

Polarized Color 048

Polarized Color 048, one of fifty images in the Polarized Color series (2010), is a small square of intensely concentrated color; moving from a deep blue at the top of the frame through a bright aquamarine at the vertical midpoint into a succession of greens tinged with yellow toward the image's base. Sugimoto created this work in his studio, using a prism to refract the morning light into seven colors and projecting these onto a white wall before recording them with a polaroid camera. The resulting images are usually displayed together and are often arranged in a horizontal line.

The spectrum that Sugimoto explores in the series is derived from Isaac Newton's analysis of optics and these works can be seen as a continuation of Newton's experiments with devices that isolate and record natural light. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, however, took issue with Newton's focus on light as a scientific phenomenon, arguing in his Theory of Color that it was through emotion, not empirical knowledge, that such phenomena should be understood. Polarized Color 048 acknowledges these positions as opposites in its title, but the image itself encourages meditation on transitions rather than categories, focusing not on the individual colors that Newton identified but on the spectrum of unnamed hues that lie between blue, green and yellow, demonstrating that art might offer a fuller, and more emotional, complement to scientific understanding of light. Thus, Polarized Color is an exploration of the tension between hard-headed science and the poetic ideals of the age of Romanticism.

Polaroid - Private Collection

Artwork Images

2015

Villa Mazza Corrati 'Le Notti Bianche'

Villa Mazza Corrati 'Le Notti Bianche' is an image from Sugimoto's Opera House series (2014 - present), an extension to his Theatre series (1980 - present), which capture cinema screens positioned in European opera houses. The focal point of these images is a glowing screen; Sugimoto captures these images by opening the shutter of the camera for the duration of a film, creating a white rectangle that both abstracts the film being shown and illuminates the space in which that film is contained. The Opera House series reflects Sugimoto's growing interest in architecture and the history of theatre; the glowing screens occupy only a small portion of the frame, directing the viewer's attention to the opulent surroundings.

This image, as is common across Sugimoto's oeuvre, is a painstakingly produced meditation of the nature of art and time and a demonstration of the camera's ability to capture what the eye cannot. The white light that emanates from the screen visually echoes representations of the divine, but is used here to represent the film that has played, suggesting that art and time have transcendent, quasi-religious properties. Seen in relation to Sugimoto's broader interest in phenomena that generate powerful emotion and yet resist representation, the pure rectangle of light appears to indicate the impossibility of capturing the power of the moving image through an isolated still. This opera house is shown as a site that balances the glowing screen, suggesting it is a space with the power and dignity to contain the intangible and positioning it as a sacred space in which we are moved by encounters that reach beyond our own lives.

Gelatin Silver Print

Artwork Images

2002

Appropriate Proportion

Appropriate Proportion is a site-specific installation, created as part of the Art House Project on the island of Naoshima, in which individual artists are given an empty or abandoned building in the town of Honmura with which to work; Sugimoto's intervention takes place in and around Go'o Shrine, which dates from the Muromachi period (1338 - 1573). The artwork has three interconnected central components. The visitor encounters the shrine from the edges of a rectangular area filled with small rocks. At the center of this area, onto which the visitor is prohibited from stepping, is a large boulder, upon which Sugimoto has built a small wooden worship hall. The shrine's sanctuary is beyond this, taking the form of another wooden structure, elevated from the ground with a central staircase of rock and glass connecting it to the space below the boulder. This space, a dark chamber, cannot be seen from above, but may be reached via an umarked downhill path that begins near the shrine and leads to a short concrete tunnel into the mountain below; in this space, the visitor once again encounters the glass stairs that lead to the sanctuary, illuminated by the light above. As the visitor turns to leave, the entrance to the concrete passageway frames a view of the sea beyond.

This installation is as much a religious site as an artwork and reflects Sugimoto's views on the nature of the divine and the ways in which it can be represented. In ancient Shinto practices, a shrine derived its power from the gods that reside in the surrounding landscape, and the choice to place a boulder at the center of this space is an act that recognizes the rocks from which these islands are made as spiritually central. The role of what Sugimoto labels the "stairway of light," connecting the spaces above and below ground, suggests the power of the divine to unify that which is separate, while the view toward the water as the visitor leaves encourages a continued mediation on the transcendental qualities of nature. Finally, the Go'o Shrine is a space that allows the visitor to observe from the edges, but not to approach or enter the sanctuary, suggesting the ultimate unknowability of the spiritual realm.

Site-Specific Installation - Go'o Shrine, Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Japan

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Influences and Connections

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Nam June Paik

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Useful Resources on Hiroshi Sugimoto

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Books

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

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Content compiled and written by Sarah Frances Dias

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Anna Blair

"Hiroshi Sugimoto Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Sarah Frances Dias
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Anna Blair
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First published on 25 Feb 2018. Updated and modified regularly
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Hiroshi Sugimoto

Summary of Hiroshi Sugimoto

Accomplishments

Biography of Hiroshi Sugimoto

Progression of Art

Polar Bear

Ligurian Sea, Saviore

Color of Shadows, 1015

Surface of Revolution with Constant Negative Curvature

Polarized Color 048

Villa Mazza Corrati 'Le Notti Bianche'

Appropriate Proportion

Similar Art

Fountain (1917)

Cut Piece (1964)

Untitled (1980)

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Hiroshi Sugimoto

Related Artists

Related Movements & Topics