Hiroshi Sugimoto makes art into art: Through the lens of his camera, the Japanese photo artist enables a completely new view of dioramas, cinema halls, as well as seascapes and architectural wonders.
(...) Continue readingHiroshi Sugimoto – Studies in Tokyo and Los Angeles; Dioramas as the first project
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo on 23 February 1948. He took his first artistic steps in school, photographing the American actress Audrey Hepburn on the screen in the cinema. This early fascination for Western culture led Hiroshi Sugimoto finally to the USA following his graduation from the Tokyo Saint Paul’s University, where he studied in 1974 at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Previously he had visited the class enemies – the Soviet Union and Poland – and had also made stops in Western Europe. He received the decisive inspiration for his first major photographic project, a series of images named simply Dioramas, when he saw the elaborately presented dioramas on display during a visit of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Photography makes visible what the eye cannot understand
Hiroshi Sugimoto found the stuffed animals placed in front of dark backgrounds as almost grotesquely artificial, but then realised that by squinting one eye and changing the perspective, he had a totally different impression of museum dioramas. He made this realisation the starting point for his artistic work. With the help of his camera, he started to bring dioramas to life, photographed them in such a way that a lively scene was created. Simultaneous to his Dioramas series, Hiroshi Sugimoto conceived the thematically related project Wax Museums, for which he took his camera into wax figure museums and brought the figures of important personalities of history on show there to illusionary life. A further success, the picture series Theaters, recalls his modest beginnings in Tokyo’s cinemas when he photographed the events on the screen from the darkness of the cinema hall. This time, however, he made sure that nothing could be seen on the screen apart from a radiant rectangle of white light that flooded the cinema hall like sunlight in a church nave.
The camera discovers cathedrals of light and shade
After these successes, Hiroshi Sugimoto developed a further series dedicated to the sea, Seascapes, a place he knew from numerous childhood excursions as a child in Japan. The idea, that the view of the wide ocean is in principle the same for modern man as it was for prehistoric man, fascinated the artist and led to a series of shots showing endless water, but never boats, birds, or even land. Architecture became a further focus of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s creativity which he sought to dissolve into essential structures of light and shade – here, the artist’s decision to photograph purely in black and white led to particularly impressive results. He regularly photographed the works of other artists such as Gerhard Richter or Richard Serra in his unmistakable style. Hiroshi Sugimoto has received prize and honours for his innovative and celebrated photographic projects, including the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2001, the Deutsche Fotobuchpreis in 2006/2007 and the renowned Praemium Imperiale in his homeland of Japan.
Hiroshi Sugimoto lives and works primarily in New York.
Hiroshi Sugimoto - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
