INDOC. Documentation Centre about Art and Nature

Artists on the internet: Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. In 1970 he graduated from Saint Paul's University in Tokyo, and in 1972 he completed his studies at the Art Center College of Design in California. Two years later he moved to New York, where he still lives. In 2001 he won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography.

Sugimoto almost always works in black-and-white and uses large-format cameras. He draws his inspiration from Renaissance paintings and the work of 19th-century pioneers in the field of photography. In his images issues related art, science, history and religion are interlinked.  

His work consists of a number of open series that he has been working on since the 1970s. These are completed over decades in the course of his numerous journeys. The series cover various themes. In 1976 he started work on a series of wax dioramas; in a series on contemporary architecture he photographs such emblematic buildings as the Eiffel Tower and the World Trade Center; in ‘Seascapes’ he captures images of the sea around the world, and his series on movie theatres and drive-ins reflects the influence of Dan Flavin and Carl André.

The website

An image of the sea serves as the backdrop to the homepage of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s website. From this page visitors can access four sections:

• news and events related to Hiroshi Sugimoto and art;
• a portfolio section where photographs by the artist are grouped by series and an explanation is provided for each;
• a biography section with a chronological summary of key events in the artist's long career; and
• a bibliography listing works about Sugimoto or to which he has contributed.

More information

• Hiroshi Sugimoto's website

Source: texts, CDAN from information provided by Hiroshi Sugimoto's website; the photo shown is the image captured from the homepage of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s website.

6 Printable version              Q Back to newsletter contents