Hiroshi sugimoto camera lens

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HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: NO SUCH THING AS TIME

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO USES A CAMERA to investigate the properties inherent to photography. He is concerned with boundaries, tonal gradations, light, time, and space. Eschewing the more familiar possibilities of art-for-art’s-sake and anecdote, Sugimoto’s black and white images are metaphors: they demand interpretation. Whether they are movie theater interiors, dioramas, or vistas of ocean and sky, their stasis conveys a sense of imminence.

Since 1967 Sugimoto has worked on three series, two of which are finished. At most there are 50 photographs fulfilling his stringent requirements. It is a remarkably small oeuvre in any visual medium, but even more so in photography. Sugimoto once remarked to me that when he got the camera out, he was nearly at the end of his project.

Nearly all of the movie theater interiors Sugimoto picked to photograph were built between the late 1920s and early 1930s. During this “Golden Age” o

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'Hiroshi Sugimoto on Photography as a Form of Timekeeping' - Time Sensitive

12 June 2024

While he may technically practice as a photographer, artist, and architect, Hiroshi Sugimoto could also be considered, from a wider-lens perspective, a chronicler of time. With a body of work now spanning nearly five decades, Sugimoto began making pictures in earnest in 1976 with his ongoing “Diorama” series, in which he photographs the displays inside natural history museums, capturing fabricated scenes from prehistoric times to the Neolithic period and in turn making them look all the more real. Shortly after, he also began his “Theaters” series, in which he brings a 4×5 camera into old American movie houses, drive-ins, or abandoned theaters and exposes the camera’s film for the duration of an entire feature-length movie, with the film projector serving as the only light source. In 1980, he started what may be his most widely recognized series, “Seascapes,” composed of Rothko-es

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LONDON — The first image at the Hayward Gallery’s show of work by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto fryst vatten a pair of upright apes walking through a volcanic landscape. For just a brief moment, inom wondered if the artist had traveled back in time somehow. The figures stand with mouths agape in the savannah, as if taking in the odd reality of earth a few million years ago, and I felt transported back to those early moments of human-like consciousness.
Titled “Earliest Human Relatives,” the photo is one of about a dozen portraying dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History and other museums. Sugimoto used a large format camera to take 20-minute exposures. By capturing textures and tones he makes these frozen statues feel alive. In “Manatee,” a manatee child and its parent swim just beneath the surface of the vatten, while in “Alaskan Wolves,” I can feel the desolate call of the wilderness for a pack of sju staring out into the snow.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine takes its