Hiroshi Sugimoto: an artistic pick

 Hello to all the lovely creatures out there!

Some may have noticed that there was no post last Monday! It was a very busy week and sadly I could not avoid not posting, but I am back again for another post before the end of the year! Today as a compensation for last week, I have brought you another artist from the photography sphere, thought he is not only a photographer, but also an artist, using his media to create "paintings", just a little different once again from what we may have known up until now. His name is Hiroshi Sugimoto!

A little bit about him: Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan in 1948. He actually took his earliest photographs in high school, by photographing film footage of Audrey Hepburn as it played in a movie theater. In 1970 he studied politics and sociology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, and in 1974 he retrained as an artist and received his BFA in Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. Afterwards, Sugimoto settled in New York City and worked as a dealer of Japanese antiquities in Soho.

U.A Play House, New York - 1978

Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of "time exposed" or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death. He is also deeply influenced by the writings and works of Marcel Duchamp, as well as the Dadaist and Surrealist movements as a whole. His use of an 8 x 10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures has garnered Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability.

Staircase Vila Farnese II, Caprarola - 2016

Sugimoto's artistic career has been marked by philosophical curiosity and a serial, analytical approach. When it comes to his work procedure, Sugimoto generally starts with a core concept or philosophical idea, and his photographs serve as a means to explore or confirm these abstract idea, rather than simply documenting subjects he finds. 

Anti-Gravitation Structure, Panel Number 4 - 2007

He places extraordinary value on craftmanship and typically uses a large-format wooden camera and black and white film, developing prints by hand according to traditional recipes. His photographs are carefully planned and often slowly executed, involving precise control over lighting and composition. A central element across his series is using photography to manipulate or represent the passage of time, such as collapsing an entire movie into a single frame or smoothing out ocean waves with long exposures.

Lightning Fields, 327 - 2014

Hiroshi Sugimoto's works invites us to rethink what photography can be - not merely a tool for capturing moments, but a medium capable of holding time, memory, and philosophical reflection within a single image. His dedication to traditional methods and his exploration of transience, life, and time set his work apart, offering viewers images that feel both timeless and profoundly contemporary. As the year comes to a close, Sugimoto’s art serves as a quiet reminder to slow down, observe carefully, and consider the deeper narratives hidden within what we see.

Hiroshi Sugimoto Portrait

Thank you all for reading up until here, I hope you found Sugimoto as interesting as I did, and you can explore a bit more his works on your own as well! Hopefully, with this post I can make up for the one that didn't make it last week too!

As always thank you for reading and I'll see you in a next post!

xoxoxo