Hiroshi Sugimoto

Born in Tokyo in 1948, Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer and artist, famous for his work on ongoing series of photographs.

His use of an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures has garnered Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He is equally acclaimed for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work

Sugimoto began in 1997 his Architecture series creating an extensive personal taxonomy of some of the twentieth century’s most notable architectural landmarks, such as Le Corbusier’s Chapelle Notre-Dame- du-Haut, Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Shooting these buildings out of focus, adjusting his lens to what he has referred to as ‘twice infinity’, he softens Modernism’s hard lines and makes the monumentally static appear to wobble and dissolve.

Pushing my old large format camera’s focal length out to twice infinity, the view through the lens was an utter blur. I discovered that superlative architecture survives, however dissolved.