Hiroshi Sugimoto

Born in Tokyo in 1948, Sugimoto moved to the United States in 1970 and began working between New York and Japan from 1974. A key aspect of his early practice is that he treated photography as a unified process encompassing exposure, development, and printing. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, traces his art to gelatin-silver photography and has included production notebooks from the late 1970s as archival material documenting his shooting and developing procedures.^*1 His earliest major series were Dioramas (natural-history museum displays photographed with a large-format camera), Theaters (cinema screens exposed for the full duration of a film), and Seascapes (horizons of sea and sky repeated across locations worldwide). MOMAT groups these three under the chapter "Time, Light and Memory," noting that time, light, and memory entered Sugimoto’s practice from an early stage.^*1 The first Dioramas work, Polar Bear (1976), is held by MoMA as object number 287.1977.^*2 Sonnabend Gallery in New York presented Movie Theaters in 1981; Dioramas, Theatres, Seascapes toured New York and Tokyo in 1988; and an exhibition of the same title was held at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, in 1989.^*3 From the 2000s onward, Sugimoto has been presented as an artist working across photography, scientific models, architecture, ancient art, and performance, through exhibitions at Mori Art Museum ("End of Time"), Fondation Cartier ("Étant donné: Le Grand Verre"), Fundación MAPFRE and Foam ("Black Box"), Hayward Gallery, UCCA, and MCA Australia ("Time Machine").^*3

Where photography makes things look real

The starting point of Sugimoto’s practice, Dioramas, photographs natural-history museum displays — taxidermied animals, painted backdrops, and exhibition lighting — presenting an artificial version of nature that looks fully real inside the photograph. The impulse came from a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in 1974, when closing one eye while looking at a taxidermy display suddenly made the scene appear completely real.^*4 Here photography acts as a device that makes artificial things plausible: taxidermy, backdrop paintings, exhibition lighting, museum taxonomy, single-eye perspective, and the fine resolution of a large-format camera combine so that an animal that was never there achieves a living presence on the photographic surface. MoMA’s Polar Bear (1976) is registered as a gelatin-silver print in the permanent collection.^*2 What the series shows is that a museum display — already a constructed model of nature — becomes even more convincingly real when reprocessed through photography.

Storing cinema as accumulated light

In Theaters, a single long exposure covers the entire running time of a film, converting the projector light into a white luminous rectangle that illuminates the cinema interior. While photographing dioramas, Sugimoto asked what would happen if an entire film were photographed in one frame: opening the shutter at the start of a screening and closing it two hours later, he obtained a brilliantly glowing screen.^*5 That accumulated light makes the otherwise dark auditorium visible — seats, ceiling, and wall decoration appear within a single image. The Metropolitan Museum’s note on Avalon Theatre, Catalina Island explains how the projection light reveals the theater interior.^*6 The series is not about a film’s narrative or characters but about how the duration of a screening can be condensed into a photographic surface. MoMA’s U.A. Walker, New York (dated 23 February 1978) is registered as a gelatin-silver print in the collection.^*7 The approach moves away from the decisive moment toward photography as a cumulative record of sustained time.

The horizon, primal memory, and repetition

Seascapes repeats a single compositional rule — sea and sky divided at roughly equal proportions — across locations worldwide, presenting both the differences between places and the near-unchanging experience of the horizon. Sugimoto has described water and air as conditions of life, saying he feels something like a homecoming whenever he looks at the sea and goes out on a "journey of seeing."^*8 From this perspective, the series is less about recording different locations than about holding constant the meeting point of water, air, and light. The group of seascapes known as Time Exposed was made between 1980 and 1991 and was exhibited simultaneously at the Carnegie Museum of Art and IBM Courtyard, Tokyo, in 1991.^*9 The Met’s Ligurian Sea, Saviore carries a place name but presents the horizon, tonal gradation, and light ahead of geographic information.^*10

Rephotographing history as portrait

In Portraits, Sugimoto converts the impossibility of photographing historical figures directly into a photographic problem, by photographing wax figures as though they were the people themselves. The series brings together Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII, Madame Tussauds wax figures, Sugimoto’s own research into Renaissance optics, and photography as an alternative mode of historical transmission. Sugimoto has said that if a photographed person looks alive, the question of what it means to be alive is worth posing again.^*11 The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s exhibition page explains that the series began with a Deutsche Guggenheim commission and presented historical figures as near-life-size black-and-white portraits against dark backgrounds with dramatic lighting.^*12 What makes these images look authentic is the combination of royal portrait painting, the wax museum’s restoration, theatrical lighting, and the precision of gelatin-silver printing. As the figure passes from painting to wax to photograph, the historical face becomes an image produced through successive media.

Photographing mathematical forms, light, and electricity

In later series, Sugimoto’s subjects extend into mathematics, the history of science, and optics. Conceptual Forms photographs nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German mathematical and mechanical models held at the University of Tokyo, treating mathematical lines, zero, and infinity as human inventions rather than discoveries.^*13 At Fondation Cartier, the series was divided into mathematical and mechanical forms and exhibited in a spatial arrangement related to Duchamp’s Large Glass.^*14 Opticks draws on Newton’s prism experiments and Goethe’s color theory; Sugimoto has said he used nearly obsolete Polaroid film in order to photograph not only the seven named spectral colors but also the transitional shades between them that have no established names.^*15 Lightning Fields applies electrical discharges directly to photographic plates, re-enacting discoveries associated with Franklin, Faraday, and Talbot in the darkroom so that Sugimoto can verify them with his own eyes.^*16 Photography becomes a device for rendering not only surfaces but also mathematical hypotheses, decomposed light, and electrical traces that are not ordinarily visible.

Why photography?

Each of Sugimoto’s series begins with a rule set in advance: photograph an entire film in one exposure; keep repeating the horizon of the world’s seas; photograph historical persons through their wax effigies. These rules are realized through exposure duration, a large-format camera, darkroom work, the tonal range of gelatin-silver printing, and the scale of exhibition space. MOMAT places gelatin-silver photography at the center of Sugimoto’s art precisely because the procedures from shooting through development and printing cannot be separated from how the work looks.^*1 In an interview with Time Sensitive, Sugimoto describes fossils as records of time millions of years old and says he uses the camera to investigate how the human sense of time was first acquired.^*17 Art21 records him describing fossils as records of time and history and photography as a form of "fossilizing time."^*18 For Sugimoto, photography is therefore not merely a means of recording what is in front of the camera but a method for working with how time is deposited in matter, how light becomes image, and how memory and history return to the present frame. UCCA describes his work as an inquiry into time and memory, the ambiguity of photography between record and creation, and the nature of photography itself.^*19 Fraenkel Gallery similarly describes it as engaging time, empiricism, and metaphysics, exploring how photography can document traces of forces that are not directly visible.^*20

Sugimoto’s reception has emphasized not only the stillness of his black-and-white surfaces and their minimal compositions but also his practice as an inquiry into photographic truth, time, exhibition systems, and historical memory. His photographs are read not simply as quiet black-and-white images but as work that makes visible the procedures by which photography constructs reality and duration. The Metropolitan Museum places Sugimoto in this context on the grounds that his photographs do not merely present a concept or preserve a traditional technique but set both to work simultaneously within a single image.^*21 The vivid presence of the white screens in Theaters and the wax figures in Portraits depends inseparably on the clarity of the idea and the precision of exposure, development, and printing — a combination that keeps Sugimoto’s analog photographs readable as a contemporary problem even in a period of dominant digital imaging. His standing in contemporary art broadly reflects the fact that his work has been repeatedly addressed across contemporary art institutions, science history, architecture, performing arts, and site-specific spatial practice. Fraenkel Gallery’s biography describes his practice as having expanded from photography into architecture, sculpture, performance, and installation, exploring history, temporality, empiricism, and metaphysics.^*20 Museum Brandhorst’s "Revolution" rotates seascapes ninety degrees so that the horizon becomes a vertical line running down the frame; the museum compares the resulting composition to Barnett Newman.^*22 Benesse Art Site Naoshima connects Sugimoto’s work to time, human perception, and the origins of consciousness, linking it to his spatial installations on Naoshima island and at Enoura Observatory.^*23 UCCA’s "Time Machine" retrospective — 127 works from eleven series spanning fifty years, organized by Hayward Gallery — included Seascapes, Theaters, Lightning Fields, and Portraits.^*19 The Aichi Triennale 2025 presentation lists Dioramas, Seascapes, Theaters, Architecture, Portraits, and Conceptual Forms, identifying long-exposure compression of time, life and death, reality and illusion, and the inversion of natural and artificial as central themes.^*24 In terms of position, Sugimoto can be described as an artist who, alongside classification under conceptual photography and minimalism, has spent half a century crossing museums, cinemas, oceans, wax-figure galleries, scientific models, optical experiments, and architectural spaces to test the conditions under which photography is trusted as a record.

The late-1980s and 1990s reception can be traced through both the expansion of solo exhibitions and the language of critical writing. Sugimoto showed Movie Theaters at Sonnabend Gallery in 1981; in 1988, Dioramas, Theatres, Seascapes was shown at Sonnabend Gallery in New York and at Sagacho Exhibit Space and Zeit-Foto Salon in Tokyo; in 1989, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, mounted a survey of the same title, noting that the large-format camera’s precise spatial rendering and the capturing of "silent time" had attracted critical attention.^*25 Contemporary criticism addressed not only the beauty of the quiet images but also the void beneath appearances, traces of time, and the instability of reality — Artforum’s 1988 review treats the photographs of sea, museum dioramas, and theaters as images of high concreteness combined with strong stillness.^*27 A separate Artforum notice reads the "trace of time" as a tool for exposing the void beneath surface appearances.^*28 Throughout the 1990s, solo exhibitions at Sonnabend Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Metropolitan Museum were accompanied by consistent coverage in the New York Times, Artforum, Village Voice, New Yorker, and Los Angeles Times.^*26 Later criticism extends the reading further: Memo Review describes Dioramas as working like wildlife photography from a distance but, on closer approach, revealing the unnaturalness of painted backdrops and composite materials so that the illusion breaks apart — reading Sugimoto’s work not only as stopping time but as folding and extending it, testing the limits of photography as a medium.^*29 The Arts Desk, while appreciating Opticks, notes that compared with abstract painting, the physical trace of the hand and emotional thickness visible on canvas are less legible, with a risk of the work looking like a science experiment.^*30 In REALKYOTO, Akira Asada invokes the idea of Sugimoto as "the last photographer" against a background of disappearing materials for gelatin-silver photography in the digital era, treating it not as simple praise but as positioning him as an artist at the moment when photography as a medium moves toward an end from its material conditions.^*31 Sugimoto’s reception has thus developed not only as an evaluation of stillness and technical refinement but as a critical discourse about how reality is made to look real, how time is handled, the border between photography and cinema, museums, wax figures, and scientific experiments, and the end of gelatin-silver photography as a medium.