Born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1948, artist Hiroshi Sugimoto’s varied interests and disciplines have garnered him international attention and brought about collaborations across diverse fields of study. A photographer, he explores ideas like time, memory, light, and the complexities of philosophical ideas around perception and vision.
Sugimoto’s interest in photography began in high school when, on a whim, he took a camera into a theater during an Audrey Hepburn film to take photographic stills of the movie. This nascent experimentation would bring about a recurrent theme in his work in the exploration of how light and time interact.
In 1974, he received a BFA degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and then moved to New York City to work as a Japanese antiques dealer. In New York he began seeing opportunities to work through conceptual ideas using photography.
Sugimoto’s early work included photographing dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, to experiment with perception, and–in a return to the movie theater–works that captured entire films in a still photograph. He began branching out into other areas of interest, which brought about work inspired by history, civilization, color theory, mathematics, and Art History.
His cross-pollinating interests have led him to collaborations in site-specific works throughout Japan, in France, and in a recent endeavor with Sony called “From Science to Fantasy,” where he will be the first of many collaborators to use a new camera Sony is developing for space exploration.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s focus on conceptual ideas and his pushing the boundaries of photography and other media continues the work that artists have undertaken throughout history: expanding human understanding through the impetus of curiosity.