HIROSHI SUGIMOTO
Kerry Brougher, Takaaki Matsumoto [Designer]
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010. First edition. Text in English. Quarto. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 400 pp. 232 illustrations. Book design by Takaaki Matsumoto. In Publisher’s shrinkwrap: an unread copy.
11.25 x 10.25-inch harddcover book still encased in the Publisher’s shrinkwrap. This exquisite monograph is the first to feature works selected from all of the series produced to date— including, of course, his most famous: Sugimoto's celebrated portraits of wax figures seem to face up to their living audiences; his Seascapes show us nothing less than a person's first conscious view of the ocean; the extremely long exposures of Theaters elevate the white, luminescent cinema screen, transforming it into a magical image of an altar; and the fascinating Dioramas—photographs of scientific display cases— allow us to travel with the artist far into the past to observe extinct animal species or the daily life of early man. Additions to the original edition are two new groups of works, Lightning Fields (2006) and Photogenic Drawings (2007).
Selected major works from all of the photo series by the Japanese grand master, in a splendid, elegant volume. Winner of the 2009 Praemium Imperiale, the so-called Nobel Prize for the arts His works are always an absolute embodiment of his chosen visual motif, reduced to its essence.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan, b. 1948) was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, where he studied politics and sociology at St. Paul's University, later retraining as an artist at the Art Center College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA. He currently lives in New York City.
Genius of the large-format camera, the long exposure and the silverprint, New York-based photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has made pictures that seem to contain whole aeons of time within themselves, and suggest an infinite palette of tonal wealth in blacks, grays and whites. Many of these images have now become a part of art culture's popular image bank (as U2's use of Sugimoto's "Boden Sea" for the cover of their 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon, demonstrated), while simultaneously evoking photography's earliest days: "I probably call myself a postmodern-experienced pre-postmodern modernist," he once joked to an interviewer. This absolutely exquisite retrospective is an expanded edition of Hatje Cantz's 2005 volume. It is the first to feature works from all of Sugimoto's series to date: his celebrated portraits of wax figures, his incredible seascapes that seem to suggest a person's first conscious view of the ocean, the extremely long exposures of theaters which elevate the white, luminescent cinema screen and transform it into a magical image of an altar and the fascinating dioramas of scientific display cases, which invite us to travel far into the past. Additions to the original edition are two new groups of works, "Lightning Fields" (2006) and "Photogenic Drawings" (2007).