Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (杉本博司, Sugimoto Hiroshi), born on February 23, 1948, is a Japanese photographer currently dividing his time between Tokyo, Japan and New York City, United States. His catalogue is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. He reportedly took his earliest photographs in high school, photographing film footage of Audrey Hepburn as it played in a movie theater. In 1970, Sugimoto studied politics and sociology at Rikkyō University in Tokyo. 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. He soon started working as a dealer of Japanese antiquities in Soho.

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.

Sugimoto is also deeply influenced by the writings and works of Marcel Duchamp, as well as the Dadaist and Surrealist movements as a whole. He has also expressed a great deal of interest in late 20th century modern architecture.

His use of an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures has garnered Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He is equally acclaimed for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work.

Sugimoto began his work with Dioramas in 1976, a series in which he photographed displays in natural history museums. (A polar bear on a fake ice floe contemplates his fresh-killed seal; vultures fight over carrion in front of painted skies; exotic monkeys hoot in a plastic jungle.) Initially the pictures were shot at the American Museum of Natural History, a place he returned for later dioramas in 1982, 1994, and 2012. Where many of the earlier silver gelatin prints – including Polar Bear (1976), his first photograph from the Diorama series –, present animals, a number of the 2012 photographs including Mixed Deciduous Forest and Olympic Rain Forest focus on natural landscapes. The cultural assumption that cameras always show us reality tricks many viewers into assuming the animals in the photos are real until they examine the pictures carefully.

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