It was my goal to visualize the ancient layer of human memory with the means of photography. — Hiroshi Sugimoto
Born in Tokyo in 1948, Hiroshi Sugimoto is an artist whose practice traverses photography, sculpture, installation, architecture, landscape design, collecting, writing, and the performing arts. Across these disciplines, he has developed an exacting meditation on time, perception, memory, and the human impulse to give form to experience. His work brings Japanese aesthetic traditions into sustained dialogue with Western philosophy, the history of science, modernist architecture, and the technologies of image-making. Photography remains the conceptual fulcrum of this expansive practice: through the disciplined manipulation of exposure, focus, light, and perspective, Sugimoto investigates how images shape our apprehension of reality and how the past persists within the present.
After graduating from Rikkyo University in Tokyo in 1970, where he studied politics and sociology, Sugimoto pursued photography at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles before moving to New York in 1974. Immersed in the intellectual and artistic ferment of the city, he began developing the sustained photographic series that would establish his international reputation. His first solo exhibition took place in Tokyo in 1977, followed by a New York presentation at Sonnabend Gallery in 1981.