Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto

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Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. In 1970 he moved to Los Angeles and studied photography at the Art Center College of Design. He lives in New York and Tokyo. He is best known for his highly stylized photographic series of seascapes, movie theaters, natural history dioramas, waxworks and Buddhist sculptures. These series provoke fundamental questions about the relationship of photography and time, as well as exploring the mysterious and ineffable nature of reality.

In recent years, Sugimoto's work has become increasingly concrete at the same time as it has become notably more abstract. It has broken out of, or beyond, photographic illusion to touch the moment of an ideal space rendered in photography. In his Architecture series (1997-2002), rather than photographing key modernist buildings to elucidate their lines and volumes, Sugimoto blurred the image in an effort to capture not the buildings themselves but mental images of them.