Hiroshi Sugimoto

Rebecca Moerman h4e

13 Mar. 17

Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer. He became famous

with his picture titled as Boden Sea. With his work he wants
people to start and think about his pictures. He is a big fan of
philosophy. He is traditional and cares a lot about traditions.
Hiroshi is born in Tokyo in 1948, just after the Second World
War. In 1970 he moved to the United States and started to study
Photography there. As artist he started to work in different
disciplines: architecture, installation but especially photography,
because he preferred this. 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 began his work with Dioramas in 1976, a series in

which he photographed displays in natural history museums.
Initially the pictures were shot at the American Museum of
Natural History, a place he returned for later dioramas in 1982,
1994, and 2012
His series called Portraits, begun as a commission by the
Deutsche Guggenheim in 1999 and is based on a similar idea. In
that series, Sugimoto photographs wax figures of Henry VIII and
his wives, think of the wax figures you can find in Madame
Tussaud. These wax figures are based on portraits from the 16th
century and when taking the picture Sugimoto attempts to
recreate the lighting that would have been used by the painter. I
do not really like this one, because it does not really seems to be
art to me.
In 1978, Sugimoto's Theatres series involved photographing old
American movie palaces and drive-ins with a camera and tripod,
opening his camera shutter and exposing the film for the duration
of the entire feature-length movie, the film projector providing the
sole lighting.
In 1980 he began working on an ongoing series of photographs of
the sea and its horizon, Seascapes, in locations all over the world,
using an old-fashioned large-format camera to make exposures of
varying duration. He used the Black sea, Norwegian Sea etc. I
love this one the most because at first I love the idea of making
pictures of different seas all over the world. Water is water but
everywhere the water is different. It depends on the weather,
climate, place and people.

To craft his exquisite black-and-white images, Hiroshi Sugimoto

uses a 19th-century-style, large-format camera, exploring his idea
of photography as a method for preserving and modeling time. I
like this because sometimes color makes you blind. If a picture
has a lot of color you might not pay attention to every detail and
that is too bad. If I see a picture I like to see all the details and
not just a few.

In the Foam Museum in Amsterdam there is a beautiful

exposition named; Black Box of Hiroshi Sugimoto. This
collection is a sort of summary of the work he produced all over
the past few years, work from different collections. It is lovely to
see and when I saw the photos I was really surprised that a
picture could impress me like that. Something fun about this
collection is that some of the work is not finished yet, that makes
gives you an eye of how the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto in the
future would look like. The collection is putted together by Phillip
Larrat-Smith and exists of 34 pieces.

The pictures above are examples of the work you can find in the
Foam Museum. I like these three photos very much. The first one
is beautiful because the photo has its story, and you can make up
the story yourself. I think the birds have a hard life and that hard
life is more visible because no colour is used. If I look at the birds
I think they are hungry, not satisfied and I think they do not like
their lives. Maybe if the picture would have some more colour the
birds would look happier, but I like the photo as how it is.
The second photo is special and detailed but simple too. The
lighting is a perfect contrast to the black background. I love the
lighting and the photo is taken perfectly sharp. The lighting
distracts you from the colour contrast. If you take a quick look
you only see black and whit but if you take a good look you also
see that there is a little grey.
The last picture is beautiful because it is such a simple picture.
The ocean/sea gives me a relaxed feeling. The emptiness of the
sea is something you cannot find anywhere else, that makes the
picture beautiful too.

Words: 794