Sunday, September 18, 2016

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese Photographer. His work is influenced heavily by Dadaist and Surrealism. As well as writings and works by Marcel Duchamp. He is very very technical, but also really conceptual and philosophical. His work is about themes of life and death as well as exploring photography as a method of preserving and modeling time. “Endeavors in art are..mere approximations, efforts to render visible unseen realms.” - Hiroshi Sugimoto
He uses an 8x10 large format camera, and varies the length of his exposures to achieve different tonal richness in his photographs —sometimes even up to 3 hours— (as seen with the seascapes series) 




The first ever photographic show i remember seeing was a commission by the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago) to have Sugimoto travel the world and shoot large format architectural photography. I think the show was called time exposed and it featured some of his seascapes and blurred images of famous architectural sites and buildings. and these images were enormous, I mean perhaps it was just that i was a really small child, but these things looked HUGE! i was completely engulfed in these images and i remember being dragged out of there because i would just sit there for hours staring at these giant mesmerizing things on the wall.




Side-note: He’s also a sculptor and an architect and he photographed Richard Serra’s sculptures. (http://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/joe.html)

Also another notable series is his lightning fields where he took Van De Graaff 400,000 volt generator, and he applied an electrical charge directly onto film and the resulting image was that of the instantaneous electrical current being applied.







Seascapes:

Architecture:

Lightning Fields:

More Info:

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