Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948, Tokyo, Japan) is a Japanese photographer whose realistic images of intangible or impossible phenomena challenged the understanding of photography as an “objective” art form.

Sugimoto received a B.A. in sociology and politics from St. Paul’s University in Tokyo in 1970. In 1972 he obtained a B.F.A. in photography from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, remaining in California after he received his degree. He moved to New York City in 1974, and in 1976 he conceived his first body of work, Dioramas. Photographing exhibits inside natural history museums, Sugimoto’s images brought to life extinct creatures and prehistoric situations. The photographs took on a sense of authenticity that the museum dioramas themselves did not possess. In his next series, Theaters, begun in 1978, he photographed movie theatres and drive-ins with an exposure the length of the film’s duration. All that appeared visible in the photographs was the luminescent rectangular screen in the centre of the theatre and the surrounding architectural details.

In 1995 Sugimoto mounted a three-part exhibition of more than 120 photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Two years later the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles commissioned him to take architectural portraits of the world’s iconic landmarks and buildings for an exhibition called “At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture.” The exhibition debuted in Tokyo in 1998 and traveled to Mexico City, Cologne, Germany, and Chicago before it arrived in Los Angeles in 2000. Also in 2000, the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin presented “Sugimoto: Portraits,” which traveled to New York City in 2001. Sugimoto’s life-sized black-and-white images of figures from wax museums were photographed in the spirit of Renaissance portraiture. In many of those portraits the subjects look as if they actually sat for the photographer.

Sugimoto received the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award in 1999 and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2001. The latter honour, accompanied by a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Hasselblad Center in the Göteberg (Sweden) Museum of Art, recognized Sugimoto for his combination of “Eastern meditative ideas with Western cultural motifs.”

In 2002 Sugimoto mounted his first major solo exhibition in the United Kingdom as part of the annual Edinburgh International Festival. “The Architecture of Time” was presented at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Scotland’s highly regarded contemporary art space, and the Stills Gallery, the country’s leading centre for photography and digital media. The exhibition incorporated more than 30 large-scale images from Sugimoto’s Seascapes and Architecture series and a new work, Pinetrees, a multipaneled piece he created specifically for the festival. “Time exposed” was the phrase Sugimoto used to describe his artistic effort, referring to the length of exposure (sometimes as long as an hour and a half or more) during which each image slowly burned onto the film. Photographed with a 19th-century large-format camera, long exposures, and 8 × 10-in (20 × 25-cm) negatives, Sugimoto’s work had the meditative quality of Japanese art.

In later years Sugimoto continued to mount solo exhibitions at major art museums in North America, Europe, and Asia, most notably at the Mori Museum in Tokyo (2005), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (2006), the Royal Ontario Museum (2007), and the National Museum of Art in Ōsaka, Japan (2008). In 2009 he installed a permanent piece, Coffin of Light, in Benesse Park, Naoshima, Japan. Also that year, he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for “painting” (broadly conceived).