Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Career and Move to New York

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. He moved to the United States in 1970 and began working between New York and Japan in 1974. A key point in understanding his early work is that he treated photography as a mode of production encompassing exposure, development, and printing. An exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, identifies gelatin silver photography as the origin of Sugimoto’s art and includes production notes dating from the late 1970s as materials documenting his shooting and developing procedures.^*1 His major early series include Dioramas, photographs of displays in natural history museums; Theaters, which condenses the running time of a film onto a single screen; and Seascapes, with its repeated horizons between sea and sky. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, groups these three series in a chapter titled “Time, Light and Memory,” showing that these themes entered Sugimoto’s work at an early stage.^*1 Polar Bear (1976), the first work in Dioramas, is listed on MoMA’s official collection page as an acquired work, object number 287.1977.^*2 Sugimoto presented Movie Theaters at Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 1981. In 1988, Dioramas, Theatres, and Seascapes traveled in New York and Tokyo, followed by an exhibition of the same name at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, in 1989.^*3 Since the 2000s, exhibitions including End of Time at Mori Art Museum, Étant donné: Le Grand Verre at Fondation Cartier, Black Box, organized by Fundación MAPFRE and Foam, and Time Machine, which traveled to Hayward Gallery, UCCA, and MCA Australia, have presented him as an artist whose work crosses photography, scientific models, architecture, antiquities, and the performing arts.^*3

Dioramas and Photographic Verisimilitude

Dioramas, Sugimoto’s point of departure, is a series depicting displays in natural history museums. It makes the artificial nature constructed from taxidermied animals, painted backdrops, and exhibition lighting appear real within the photograph. The series arose from Sugimoto’s visit to the American Museum of Natural History in 1974, when he discovered that a display of taxidermied animals against a painted background suddenly looked real when seen with one eye.^*4 Photography here acts as an apparatus that makes an artificial object appear real. Taxidermy, painted scenery, display lighting, the museum’s taxonomic presentation, monocular perspective, and the detailed rendering of a large-format camera converge on the photographic surface to create a lifelike image of animals that were never present in the depicted scene. MoMA lists Polar Bear as a 1976 gelatin silver print, providing an official collection record for a defining work from Dioramas.^*2 In this series, the photograph turns the museum’s model of nature into a still more convincing scene. Sugimoto photographs the mechanism by which nature is made to look real more than nature itself.

Theaters and Long Exposure

In Theaters, an entire film projected on a movie screen is transformed through a single long exposure into a luminous white plane. Sugimoto has said that while photographing in natural history museums, he asked himself what would happen if he photographed a whole movie in one frame. He opened the shutter as the film began and closed it two hours later, producing a glowing white screen.^*5 The light illuminates the theater interior, usually submerged in darkness, bringing the screen, seats, ceiling, and wall ornament into a single photograph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s account of Avalon Theatre, Catalina Island likewise explains that the light of the projected film makes the theater interior visible.^*6 The series centers on how the duration of a screening remains on the photographic surface, rather than on plot or characters. MoMA lists U.A. Walker, New York as a gelatin silver print dated February 23, 1978.^*7 The work departs from the idea of photography as the capture of a decisive moment: it accumulates the duration of a screening as a quantity of light, which in turn records the architectural space.

Stefano Baschiera discusses Theaters as photographic work that makes visible the cinematic apparatus itself—screen, projection, architecture, seating, and running time—not simply as photographs made by exposing a whole film. When a film is compressed into a single image as the average of roughly 170,000 frames, narrative and actors disappear, leaving only the light and theatrical space that make cinema possible.^*38 Theaters thus uses the photograph’s long exposure to demonstrate in reverse that cinema is an apparatus through which time unfolds.

Seascapes and the Horizon

Seascapes repeats a composition divided almost equally between sea and sky at locations around the world, presenting both geographical difference and the nearly unchanging experience of the horizon. Sugimoto regards water and air as conditions of life and has said that whenever he sees the sea, he feels the reassurance of visiting his ancestral home and embarks on a “journey of seeing”.^*8 In light of this statement, what matters in Seascapes is the sustained observation, under consistent conditions, of the horizon where water, air, and light meet, more than the landscape information of each site. The seascapes presented as Time Exposed were made between 1980 and 1991. Addressing changes at the point where sky and sea meet, they were exhibited concurrently at the Carnegie Museum of Art and IBM Courtyard in Japan in 1991.^*9 By photographing seas around the world in the same horizon format, place names, dates, weather, and gradations of light remain as comparable differences within a single pictorial structure. Although its title identifies a particular sea, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Ligurian Sea, Saviore foregrounds the horizon, tonal gradation, and quality of light over geographical information.^*10 The repetition in Seascapes shows that even when the sea is reduced to horizon, tone, and light, viewers still recognize it as sea. Each image superimposes a record of place and an abstract composition.

Portraits and Historical Portraiture

In Portraits, Sugimoto turns the self-evident impossibility of directly photographing historical figures into a photographic problem by photographing wax figures. The series layers Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII, the wax figure at Madame Tussauds, Sugimoto’s own study of Renaissance lighting, and photography as a surrogate means of record. Sugimoto explains that if the depicted figure appears alive, we should reconsider what it means to be alive.^*11 The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s exhibition page explains that the series began with a commission from Deutsche Guggenheim and presented historical figures against black backgrounds with dramatic lighting in near-life-size black-and-white portraits.^*12 Their appearance of authenticity arises from the combination of royal portraiture, the wax museum’s reconstruction, black backgrounds and dramatic lighting, and the precision of gelatin silver prints. As the figure passes from painting to waxwork and from waxwork to photograph, the historical face emerges as an image constructed through several media.

Conceptual Forms, Opticks, and Lightning Fields

In Sugimoto’s later series, photography extends to mathematics, the history of science, and optics. Conceptual Forms depicts German mathematical and mechanical models from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries preserved at the University of Tokyo, treating mathematical lines, zero, and infinity as human inventions rather than discoveries.^*13 The photographs record visible objects while addressing the equations and conceptual forms behind them. In Fondation Cartier’s exhibition Étant donné: Le Grand Verre, the series was divided into mathematical and mechanical forms and presented in a spatial arrangement relating it to Duchamp’s The Large Glass.^*14 For Opticks, Sugimoto drew on Newton’s prism experiments and Goethe’s theory of color. He explains that he used nearly obsolete Polaroid film to photograph color not only as the seven colors into which natural science divided it, but also as the difficult-to-name hues between them.^*15 In Lightning Fields, his interest in Franklin, Faraday, and Talbot led him to apply electrical discharges to photographic plates, reenacting discoveries from the history of science in the darkroom so that he could verify them with his own eyes.^*16 Photography here renders as images not just the surfaces of objects, but ordinarily invisible conditions such as mathematical hypotheses, the division of light, and traces of electricity.

Why Sugimoto Chose Photography

Each of Sugimoto’s series begins with a predetermined photographic procedure. Methods such as photographing an entire film in one image, repeatedly photographing the boundary between sea and sky in the same composition, or portraying wax figures as historical people become visible images through exposure time, the large-format camera, darkroom work, the tonal range of gelatin silver prints, and the scale of the exhibition space. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, identifies the increasingly endangered medium of gelatin silver photography as the origin of Sugimoto’s art because the procedures from shooting through developing and printing cannot be separated from the appearance of the work.^*1 Sugimoto’s own remarks also show how closely this method is bound to his interest in time. In an interview with Time Sensitive, he describes fossils as records of time from millions of years ago and speaks of his interest in how his personal history, human history, and the history of life began.^*17 He further connects the acquisition of a sense of time to the beginning of human consciousness and explains that he uses the camera to investigate this curiosity.^*17 In the same conversation, he says that handling fossils and stone tools evokes a sense of tracing the memory of human existence, rather than personal memory.^*17 His interest in time can therefore be understood as a question about tracing the beginnings of life, human toolmaking, and consciousness through present bodily experience, rather than as nostalgic recollection. It directly shapes the form of each series. In the same interview, Sugimoto says that the camera works as a time machine for examining the past; that the duration of a film returns to white light in Theaters; and that in Seascapes, he sometimes stops time and at other times lets it flow to see what appears on the film.^*17 He also explains that his experience of an artificial display appearing real when seen with one eye and stripped of depth led to the monocular camera and the use of a large-format camera in Dioramas.^*17 In Art21, Sugimoto similarly treats fossils as records of time and history and describes photography as the “fossilization of time”.^*18 For Sugimoto, photography is thus a means of addressing how time remains in matter, how light becomes an image, and under what conditions memory and history return on a present surface. In Theaters, screening time and projected light accumulate on a white screen; in Seascapes, the horizon where water, air, and light meet is repeated; and in Dioramas and Portraits, display, wax, lighting, and the camera’s descriptive power make constructed things appear real. UCCA explains that Sugimoto’s work raises questions about time and memory, the medium’s ambiguity between record and creation, and the nature of photography itself.^*19 Fraenkel Gallery likewise describes his work as addressing time, empiricism, and metaphysics, and as using classical photographic techniques to explore how photography can record traces of invisible forces.^*20 This work overlaps with artistic developments since the 1960s in which photography began to examine its own conditions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960 explains that photography—mechanically reproduced and distributed throughout culture in printed matter, passports, and photo booths—became a means for artists to consider the medium itself after the 1960s.^*21 The Met attributes the attention given to Sugimoto and James Welling amid the rise of digital imaging to their early combination of an interest in conceptualism with close attention to the material basis of analog photography.^*21 In Sugimoto’s case, the effort to make time, memory, and light into works of art brings exposure, film, the darkroom, the print, and the exhibition space itself to the fore, revealing photography’s ability to accumulate time, create verisimilitude, and leave images of what cannot ordinarily be seen.

Starting Dates and Photographic Methods of the Major Series

Dioramas began in 1976, transforming natural history museum displays into photographs with a large-format camera and long exposures.^*4 Theaters began in 1978; Sugimoto kept the shutter open throughout an entire film, accumulating the image on the screen as white light.^*5 Beginning in 1980, Seascapes repeated a composition bisected by the horizon into sea and sky.^*32 From 1997, Architecture employed deliberate defocusing, while from 2006, Lightning Fields subjected photosensitive material directly to high voltage.^*33 Sugimoto’s methods should therefore not all be grouped under “long exposure”; the distinct conditions of camera, exposure, focus, and camera-less production must be considered series by series.^*35

FIG. 01 — Polar Bear, 1976 (Dioramas)

The first work in Dioramas, made in 1976, depicts a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. MoMA holds it as a gelatin silver print, object number 287.1977.^*2 It arose from Sugimoto’s experience of seeing a display of taxidermied animals against a painted background suddenly appear real when viewed with one eye.^*4 The work first embodied the method of Dioramas, in which photography turns a museum’s model of reconstructed nature into a still more convincing scene.

FIG. 02 — U.A. Walker, New York, 1978 / Avalon Theatre, Catalina Island (Theaters)

These are two defining works from Theaters. MoMA holds U.A. Walker, New York as a gelatin silver print dated February 23, 1978.^*7 A single long exposure transforms the full running time of a film into a luminous white plane, whose light brings the theater’s seats, ceiling, and wall ornament into a single image. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s account of Avalon Theatre, Catalina Island likewise confirms that the light of the projected film makes the theater interior visible.^*6

FIG. 03 — Ligurian Sea, Saviore (Seascapes)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds this photograph as one of the representative works of Seascapes.^*10 Although its title names a specific sea, the image foregrounds the horizon, tonal gradation, and quality of light over geographical information. It embodies the series’ repetition of the same horizon composition across seas around the world, layering a record of place and an abstract composition within one image.

FIG. 04 — Portraits—Re-Portraying Historical Figures

This series portrays wax figures of historical people. It began with a commission from Deutsche Guggenheim and presents a wax figure based on Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII against a black background with dramatic lighting, in a near-life-size black-and-white portrait.^*12 Sugimoto’s statement that if the depicted person looks alive, we should reconsider what it means to be alive clarifies the series’ premise.^*11 By passing the figure from painting to waxwork and from waxwork to photograph, the work makes visible how a historical face emerges through multiple images and media.

Architecture, 1997—Defocusing the 8 × 10 View Camera

In Architecture, Sugimoto photographs modern architecture with an 8 × 10-inch view camera but shifts the focus—described as “twice-infinity”—deliberately blurring the outlines with a large-format camera ordinarily used for exact description. His official website places 1997 examples including World Trade Center and Church of the Light among the series’ earliest works.^*33 MW Editions likewise describes the series as beginning in 1997 and employing deliberate manipulation of focus with an 8 × 10 view camera, confirming a method that removes details to test whether architecture can persist as a “form” in memory.^*34

Lightning Fields, 2006—Recording Electricity Directly on Film

Lightning Fields began in 2006. Sugimoto applies high voltage from a Van de Graaff generator directly to film, turning traces of electric current into images. His official website identifies Lightning Fields 001 as a work from 2006.^*35 Fraenkel Gallery describes the group as made with electrical charges of 400,000 volts. This is a camera-less process in which electricity acts directly on photosensitive material, rather than an exposure that records the outside world through a lens.^*36

Assessments of Photography, Time, and Reality

Critical responses to Sugimoto have emphasized more than the stillness of his black-and-white images and their minimal compositions. They have also addressed his treatment of photographic truth, time, systems of display, and historical memory. His photographs have been read as works that make visible the procedures through which photography produces time and an appearance of reality. The Met places Sugimoto in this context because his photographs neither merely present concepts nor merely preserve classical techniques; they bring both into operation within the same image.^*21 The white screens of Theaters and the wax figures of Portraits possess a strong sense of reality because the clarity of their ideas cannot be separated from the precision of exposure, development, and printing. This quality kept Sugimoto’s analog photography relevant to contemporary questions as digital images proliferated. His place in the broader field of contemporary art also reflects how often his work has appeared beyond specialist photographic contexts—in museums of contemporary art and in settings concerned with the history of science, architecture, the performing arts, antiquities, and site-specific spatial production. Fraenkel Gallery’s biography describes a career centered on photography since the 1970s that has expanded into architecture, sculpture, performance, and installation while exploring history, temporal existence, empiricism, and metaphysics.^*20 Museum Brandhorst’s Revolution rotates nocturnal seascapes ninety degrees, turning the horizon into a vertical line. The museum presents the series as a vertical composition recalling Barnett Newman.^*22 Once a nocturnal seascape is rotated, its horizon becomes a line running vertically through the image, and information about sea and sky appears as a dark plane, a layer of light, and a vertical tension. Through this operation, Sugimoto’s seascapes can be read simultaneously as landscape photographs indicating a site and as abstract images showing relations between line and plane. Benesse Art Site Naoshima relates his work to themes of time, human perception, and the origins of consciousness, as well as to spatial works extending to Go’o Shrine on Naoshima and the Enoura Observatory.^*23 UCCA presents Time Machine as a retrospective of 127 works in eleven series spanning the previous fifty years, including Seascapes, Theaters, Lightning Fields, and Portraits, and identifies it as an exhibition organized by Hayward Gallery in London.^*19 The artist profile for Aichi Triennale 2025 names Dioramas, Seascapes, Theaters, Architecture, Portraits, and Conceptual Forms, describing themes that include the compression of time through long exposure and reversals between life and death, reality and fiction, and nature and artifice.^*24 On the basis of this reception, Sugimoto can be situated beyond the categories of conceptual photography and minimalism as an artist who has moved among museums, cinemas, seas, wax museums, scientific models, optical experiments, and architectural spaces to examine the conditions under which photographs are trusted as records.

Against the conventional idea of photography as a technology for preserving an instant, Susana Santoyo reconsiders photographic time and technique through the examples of Sugimoto and Wolfgang Tillmans. She situates Sugimoto’s work as producing different concepts of time through exposure length and the operation of the apparatus, instead of freezing a single past instant.^*39 When several hours are compressed into a white screen in Theaters, and seas from different times and places are placed within the same horizon format in Seascapes, time becomes part of the photographic procedure itself, not a theme outside the photograph.

Critical and International Reception in the 1980s and 1990s

The reception of Sugimoto’s work from the late 1980s through the 1990s can be traced not simply through the growing number of solo exhibitions, but through the language critics used to describe it. Sugimoto presented Movie Theaters at Sonnabend Gallery in 1981. In 1988, he showed Dioramas, Theatres, and Seascapes at Sonnabend Gallery in New York and at Sagacho Exhibit Space and Zeit-Foto Salon in Tokyo.^*3 The National Museum of Art, Osaka’s 1989 exhibition Recent Works 5: Hiroshi Sugimoto introduced thirty-five works from Dioramas, Theaters, and Seascapes to the Kansai region for the first time. Its record notes the attention given to Sugimoto’s precise rendering of space with a large-format camera and his capture of “silent time”.^*25 Criticism from the period addressed the void beneath appearances, traces of time, and the instability of verisimilitude alongside the beauty of the still images. An Artforum review from 1988 treats Sugimoto’s photographs of the sea, museum dioramas, and theaters as highly specific images with a pronounced stillness.^*27 The summary of another Artforum review reads the “trace of time” as an instrument for exposing the void beneath appearances.^*28 These responses show that Sugimoto’s work was received not simply as beautiful black-and-white photography, but as photography that unsettled the certainty of what could be seen. During the 1990s, solo exhibitions at Sonnabend Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were accompanied by reviews in the New York Times, Artforum, the Village Voice, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. Seascapes, Motion Picture, and Still Life became recurring subjects in critical columns as well as the gallery market.^*26 Later criticism has extended these readings in several directions. Memo Review writes that Dioramas passes as wildlife photography from a distance, while the unnatural painted backgrounds and composite materials become visible at close range and the illusion fractures. It reads Sugimoto’s photographs as folding and stretching time and testing the limits of the medium, as well as “stopping time”.^*29 While responding favorably to Opticks, The Arts Desk argues that in comparison with abstract painting, the work risks appearing like a scientific experiment because the traces of the hand and emotional density evident on a painted surface are difficult to see.^*30 Writing in REALKYOTO against the background of photographic materials disappearing with digitization, Akira Asada presents a reading of Sugimoto as the “last photographer.” He frames this less as simple praise than as the position of an artist standing at a point where the material conditions of the photographic medium are approaching their end.^*31 Sugimoto’s reception has thus developed through critical debates over the construction of verisimilitude, the treatment of time, the boundaries among photography, cinema, museums, wax figures, and scientific experiments, and the end of gelatin silver photography, alongside praise for stillness and technical accomplishment.

At the same time, affirming the quiet of Seascapes solely in terms of universality or spirituality captures only one aspect of its critical history. Joshua Petitto argues that Sugimoto’s “oceanic vision,” while seeking an alternative to modernity and the recovery of religious feeling, also comes into contact with politically regressive ideas in Japanese cultural production of the 1930s and with an aesthetics of death and stasis.^*37 This argument does not directly identify Sugimoto’s own work with a particular political ideology. It reexamines the meanings that a vocabulary of the horizon, eternity, and a return to the premodern has carried within twentieth-century Japanese intellectual history. This perspective keeps assessments of Sugimoto from ending with praise of his work as “serene and universal.”