HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

Born 1948 in Tokyo, Japan. Lives and works in Tokyo and New York, USA.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lightning Fields Illuminated 003, 2008, black and white film with light box, 177.8 x 111.8 x 10.2 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo

Hiroshi Sugimoto works primarily in the medium of photography. He is known for producing a number of distinct and iconic series of works that share a common interest in the artistic image and its relation to experience of time and reality. Sugimoto is a brilliant technician with a mastery of the 8 x 10” large-format camera, extremely long exposures and different ways of making images. He uses the camera as a meditative instrument, speaking of his photographs as ‘time exposed’.

Sugimoto draws inspiration from Buddhist traditions, Japanese aesthetics, minimalism and conceptual art, as well as from the ‘readymade’ legacy of Marcel Duchamp. He has turned his lens to such subjects as museum dioramas, movie theatres, iconic modernist buildings, models of mathematical theories, machines illustrating the principles of physics, open seascapes, candles and shadows. One of his earliest series, based on anachronistic dioramas in natural history museums, stripped away both the art and artifice of these works to make them seem almost real. He has also applied a similar approach to historical wax figures, working carefully to mimic the lighting approach of a portrait painter from centuries ago. In another series, he produced slightly fuzzy views of modern architectural icons, such as the World Trade Center and the Guggenheim Museum, with the lens set at infinity.

Sugimoto is perhaps best known for two long-lasting series of work. In the late 1970s, he began photographing old American cinemas and drive-ins, many of them now demolished, exposing his film for the duration of the movie in play, using only the source of light emanating from the film projector. In these photographs, entitled Theatres, the screen takes on a luminescent glow, revealing an image of time captured in the architecture, whether art deco palaces or everyday drive-ins. His Seascapes series, produced throughout the 1980s and 1990s, are photographs of horizons of water and sky of a Zen stillness, captured in such diverse places as the Caribbean and the Baltic, but with the horizon line being at the same place in each. He regards these works as primordial, representing one of the things that early humanity would have experienced.

For the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Sugimoto will create a special installation for the Power House on Cockatoo Island of light boxes from his recent Lighting Fields series. The title refers obliquely to Walter de Maria’s installation of lightning rods in Western New Mexico, but the work is based on Sugimoto’s recent experiments of photographically imaging static electricity on large-format film. This series is inspired by the early scientific bent of photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, who himself experimented with static electricity and whose early paper negatives Sugimoto has previously reprinted. Sugimoto’s recent ‘prints’ are created by using a Van de Graaff generator to produce static with a metal ball, which is then brought close to a sheet of photographic film placed on a metal table that records the high-voltage electrical discharge. Part medium, part scientist, Sugimoto is both recorder and facilitator of this creative process in which evanescent tendrils of forked ‘lightning’ manifest the fundamental natural relationship between light, energy, power, and the dawn of life itself. In the Power House on Cockatoo Island, spectators will view the glowing images held aloft on a series of stage-like platforms; and at the end of their ascent through the space they are faced, high on an ancient wooden pole, with a thirteenth-century Japanese sculpture of Raijin, the God of Thunder.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘Nature of Light’, Izu Photo Museum, Mishima, Japan
2008 ‘History of History’, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan
2008 ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto’, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
2006 ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto’, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA
2005 ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time’, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Mapping the Studio’, Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy
2009 ‘In-finitum’, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Italy
2008 ‘Photography on Photography’, Metropolitan Museum, New York, USA
2007 ‘KANNON ’, Museum Rietberg, Zurich, Switzerland
2004 ‘Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated)’, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA

Selected Bibliography

Parveen Adams, ‘Out of Sight, Out of Body: The Sugimoto/Demand Effect’, Grey Room, vol. 22, Cambridge, winter 2006, pp. 87–104
David Elliott, ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: The Rags of Time’, Hiroshi Sugimoto, K. Brougher and D. Elliott (eds.), Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2005
Minoru Shimizu, ‘Sugimoto – Guardian of the Void’, Art It, vol. 3, no. 4, Tokyo, winter 2005, pp. 59–65
Christopher Turner, ‘Lightning Fields’, Modern Painters, vol. XXI , no. 3, April 2009, pp. 40−45
John Yao, ‘Enigmatic Objects’, Aperture, no. 178, spring 2005, pp. 50–57