A new, comprehensive survey of Sugimoto's five-decade career, from grand dioramas and seascapes to eerie portraits of wax effigies and more

Through his expansive exploration of the possibilities of still images, Hiroshi Sugimoto has created some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time--pictures that are meticulously crafted and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalizingly ambiguous. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is a comprehensive survey of work produced over the past five decades, featuring selections from all of Sugimoto's major series, as well as lesser-known works that illuminate his innovative, conceptually driven approach to making pictures.
Texts by international writers, artists and scholars?including Geoffrey Batchen, Edmund de Waal, Mami Kataoka, Ralph Rugoff, Lara Strongman and Margaret Wertheim?highlight his work's philosophical yet playful inquiry into the nature of representation and art, our understanding of time and memory, and the paradoxical character of photography as a medium so well suited to both documenting and invention.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries throughout the world, and his work is held in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; National Gallery, London; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Smithsonian, Washington, DC; and Tate, London, among others. Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City.

The meticulous practice of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) is like that of a painter's. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's obsession with the mechanics of space and the mathematical foundations of his works, such as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (or The Large Glass), Sugimoto photographed nineteenth-century mathematical models from the collection at the Komaba Museum at the University of Tokyo, which also features the third and last authorized replica of Duchamp's Large Glass. Like the models that Man Ray photographed in the 1930s at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, these objects also require a visual understanding of complicated trigonometry functions. This is the first publication to compare and contrast Sugimoto's photographs of mathematical models with his own mathematical models--computer-controlled precision tools made of aluminum.

The architecture of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Tomoyuki Sakakida's New Material Research Laboratory revives ancient construction materials for the present

The architectural practice of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Tomoyuki Sakakida is informed by a simple paradox: the oldest things are the newest. In 2008, Sugimoto and Sakakida founded New Material Research Laboratory with an aim to develop new materials for construction based upon much older materials and techniques. The NMRL reinvigorates material from ancient times and the Middle Ages by using it in the context of a distinctly contemporary design sensibility and thus creating a physical connection between the past and the present. This beautiful hardcover volume delves into the art and architecture as well as the archaeological philosophy of the Laboratory. Each project is characterized by the materials used in its construction and is illustrated with rich full-color photography. Sugimoto and Sakakida are the principal authors of the accompanying text, extrapolating on their design ethos and its roots in Japanese aesthetic tradition; supplemental reading provides further historical context. The book also includes an annotated index of materials and classic Japanese techniques with information drawn from the Laboratory's research.

An accomplished photographer in addition to his architectural work, Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) is perhaps best known for his consistent experimentation with the limits of photographic representation, such as in his long-exposure series Theatres and Seascapes.

Architect and furniture designer Tomoyuki Sakakida (born 1976) has been the director of NMRL since 2013. He currently teaches at Kyoto University of Art and Design.

A study in dioramas four decades in the making, Sugimoto's photographs explore the stylized reality of museum-made habitats and what they reveal about nature and the power of photography to document the natural world. -Phil Bicker, Time Lightbox

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) began his four-decade-long series Dioramas in 1974, inspired by a trip to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Surrounded by the museum's elaborate, naturalistic dioramas, Sugimoto realized that the scenes jumped to life when looked at with one eye closed. Recreated forestry and stretches of uninhabited land, wild, crouching animals against painted backgrounds and even prehistoric humans seemed entirely convincing with this visual trick, which launched a conceptual exploration of the photographic medium that has traversed his entire career. Focusing his camera on individual dioramas as though they were entirely surrounding scenes, omitting their frames and educational materials and ensuring that no reflections enter the shot, his subjects appear as if photographed in their natural habitats. He also explores the power of photography to create history--in his own words, photography functions as a fossilization of time. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Dioramas narrates a story of the cycle of life, death and rebirth, from prehistoric aquatic life to the propagation of reptile and animal life to Homo sapiens' destruction of the earth, circling back to its renewal, where flora and fauna flourish without man. Here Sugimoto writes his own history of the world, an artist's creation myth.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, where he studied politics and sociology at Rikkyõ University, later retraining as an artist at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, CA. He currently lives in New York and Tokyo.

Copublished by Aperture and Fundación MAPFRE

The eeriness of the copy: Sugimoto's portraits of wax figures

At first glance, Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographic portrait of King Henry VIII of England is arresting: Sugimoto's camera has captured the tactility of Henry's furs and silks, the elaborate embroidery of his doublet, the light reflecting off of each shimmering jewel. The contours of the king's face are so lifelike that he appears to be almost three-dimensional. It seems as though the 21st-century artist has traveled back in time nearly 500 years to photograph his royal subject.

But Sugimoto's portraits of historical figures are fictions, at least twice removed from their subjects, made by photographing a wax figure that has been created by a sculptor from either a photographic portrait or a painted one. Sugimoto shoots his subjects in black and white, posing the sitter against a black background, amplifying the illusion that we are viewing a contemporary portrait in which the subject has stepped out of history.

This volume presents the photographer's images of the wax figures alongside a selection of portraits of living subjects and photographs of memento mori. As with his other major bodies of work--Dioramas, Seascapes and Theaters--Sugimoto's Portraits address the passage of time and history, and question the nature of the reality captured by the camera. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Portraits is the fourth in a series of books on Sugimoto's major bodies of work and presents 70 photographs, 7 of which have never before been published.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) has helped define what it means to be a multidisciplinary contemporary artist, his photographs blurring the lines between photography, painting, installation and architecture. Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City.

The latest in Damiani and MW Editions' Sugimoto project collects his majestic images of classic modernist buildings

In 1997, Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) began a series of photographs of significant works of modernist architecture, intending to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture. One of the hallmarks of Sugimoto's work is his technical mastery of the medium. He makes photographs exclusively with an 8 x 10 view camera, and his silver gelatin prints are renowned for their tonal range, total lack of grain, wealth of detail and overall optical precision. In making the Architecture photographs, however, he inverted his usual process: Pushing out my old large-format camera's focal length to twice-infinity ... I discovered that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testing architecture for durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process.

In this volume, which includes 19 previously unpublished images, the language of architectural modernism is distilled in photographs of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao. By virtue of their blurriness and lack of color, the images strip down buildings to their essence, what we might imagine was the architect's first, pure vision of form. The details of construction and imperfections that are a natural result of a massive, collaborative human undertaking are absent, and instead light and shadow define the forms of these buildings. The Architecture photographs continue the artist's longstanding investigations of the passage of time and history. Are these monuments to human ingenuity and the power of the industrial age as eternal as they seem?

Hiroshi Sugimoto rotates a nocturnal seascape 90 degrees to turn the horizons into vertical lines, dissipating the Romantic image of the night

Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the best-known photographic artists of our time. His unique accomplishment in photography has been to contradict the medium's conventional task--namely, to record reality as precisely as possible. In Sugimoto's work, one is confronted with aformal reduction of images, by which he addresses fundamental questions of space and time, past and present, art and science, imagination and reality. I was concerned with revealing an ancient stage of human memory through the medium of photography, he said in 2002. Whether it is individual memory or the cultural memory of mankind itself, my work is about returning to the past and remembering where we came from and how we came about. This volume presents a group of images that Sugimoto has been working on for a long time. From a technical perspective, the nature of the pictures is undeniably photographic, but in terms of how they are perceived and understood, they might be more readily ascribed to a painterly or conceptual sphere. The point of departure for the 15 works, titled Revolution, is a nocturnal seascape, rotated 90 degrees to turn the horizons into vertical lines, dissipating the Romantic image of the night. The suite's title alludes not to social unrest, but rather to an overturning of previously accepted laws or practices through new insights or methods. Without changing the pictures' material substance or subject, the usual connotations of nocturnes are obviated; instead, highly original abstract configurations emerge.

Cahiers d'Art celebrates the 100th issue of the revue with Hiroshi Sugimoto.

The issue, a true tribute to Sugimoto, is rooted in The World is Dead Today, a story written by Sugimoto for his exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo (2015), in which his photographic works are juxtaposed against his eclectic antiques collection recounting the end of modernity.

Issue No.1 2014 is a rare opportunity to see unpublished works reproduced at the highest standard. Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed Sugimoto for the issue and Akiko Miki, Chief Curator, Palais de Tokyo, has contributed an important text on the artist's work.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Japan in 1948. A photographer since the 1970s, his work deals with history and temporal existence by investigating themes of time, empiricism, and metaphysics. His primary series include: Seascapes, Theaters, Dioramas, Portraits (of Madame Tussaud's wax figures), Architecture, Colors of Shadow, Conceptual Forms and Lightning Fields. Sugimoto has received a number of grants and fellowships, and his work is held in the collections of the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of New York, among many others.

Glass Tea House Mondrian documents Hirosho Sugimoto's (born 1948) first architectural work in Europe--a tea-house pavilion of extraordinary beauty in a formerly unused space on San Giorgio Island, Venice. After the tea ceremony, visitors exit the courtyard through a Japanese garden, in which Sugimoto has placed architectural fragments found locally.