Hiroshi Sugimoto

For more than 30 years, Hiroshi Sugimoto has traveled the world photographing its seas, producing an extended meditation on the passage of time and the natural history of the earth reduced to its most basic, primordial substances: water and air. Always capturing the sea at a moment of absolute tranquility, Sugimoto has composed all the photographs identically, with the horizon line precisely bifurcating each image. The repetition of this strict format reveals the uniqueness of each meeting of sea and sky, with the horizon never appearing exactly the same way twice. The photographs are romantic yet absolutely rigorous, apparently universal but exceedingly specific.

Essays by David Elliott, Kerry Brougher and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

'Hiroshi Sugimoto: Still Life' includes 'Polar Bear' (1976), his first photograph from the Diorama series, exhibited along with later works from the 1980s, 1990s, and, most recently 2012. Where many of the earlier silver gelatin prints present animals, a number of the 2012 photographs including Mixed Deciduous Forest and Olympic Rain Forest focus on natural landscapes. He has likened the record created by photography to a process of fossilization - the evidence of a moment suspended in time.

This lavish book is the only complete collection of the renowned Theaters series, in which Hiroshi Sugimoto opens his shutter as a film begins and closes it as it concludes. "Different movies give different brightnesses. If it's an optimistic story, I usually end up with a bright screen; if it's a sad story, it's a dark screen. Occult movie? Very dark."

"Following its recent announcement of plans to open a major gallery in Mayfair, Pace London is honored to present 'Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes' at 6 Burlington Gardens from 4 October through 17 November 2012. The inaugural exhibition juxtaposes Mark Rothko's late black and grey paintings with Hiroshi Sugimoto's contemporary photographs of bodies of water. The exhibition marks the first private gallery presentation of Rothko's work in London in nearly fifty years and continues Pace's five-decade tradition of exhibitions that explore affinities between artists working across decades and mediums. 'Dark Paintings and Seascapes' pairs eight acrylic paintings by Rothko and eight gelatin silver prints by Sugimoto, revealing two different artistic approaches that arrive at similar conclusions."--Gallery's press release. Exhibition: Pace Gallery, London, UK (4.10.-17.11.2012).

Photographs of sculpture "Joe" by Richard Serra accompanied by poetic text.

At first glance, Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographic portrait of King Henry VIII of England is arresting: his camera has captured the tactility of Henry's luxurious furs and silks, the elaborate embroidery of his doublet, and the light reflecting off of each shimmering jewel. The contours of the king's face are so lifelike that he appears to be almost three- dimensional. It seems as though the twenty-first century artist has traveled back in time nearly five hundred years to photograph his royal subject. While Sugimoto's portraits of historical figures appear to capture a lived moment in time, they are fictions. These portraits are in fact at least twice removed from the subject: his photograph captures a wax figure that has been created by a sculptor from either a photographic portrait or a painted one. Sugimoto has photographed his portraits of historical subjects in black and white, with each "sitter" posed against a black background, giving the images an austere formality. The black backdrop, free of any props or additional visual information, amplifies the illusion that we are viewing a contemporary portrait in which the subject has stepped out of history. Other portraits appear to be photojournalistic. Sugimoto's image of the Duke of Wellington at Napoleon's deathbed is actually a photograph of the mise en scene created by the wax museum, but it registers as real in our minds. The portraits of wax figures, which in this volume are presented alongside a handful of portraits of living subjects and photographs of memento mori, call into question what it is the portrait captures. As with his other major bodies of work--Dioramas, Seascapes, Theaters--Sugimoto's Portraits address the passage of time and history. We recognize these historical figures because of the many contemporaneous drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that have recorded them. We take it for granted that a photograph of a living subject is true, but what does that mean? Are Sugimoto's portraits of living subjects more "true" than the historical portraits of wax figures? Is Hans Holbein's painted portrait of Henry VIII truer than Sugimoto's photograph of the wax figure made from Holbein's painting?

The Long Never is a special-edition book containing 65 artworks by Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948). Composed of photographs from five series--Meteorites, Dioramas, Pre-Photographic Time Recording Devices, Lightning Fields and Seascapes--the sequence of images in this book conjures a natural history of the planet, perhaps even one untouched by humans. The black-and-white photographs are hand-tipped onto the pages of the book, which is wrapped in silk cloth. Celebrated author Jonathan Safran Foer has written an original story for the volume. Foer's text sits on the page underneath each artwork, so the reader must lift up each photograph in order to read the story. The Long Never is limited to an edition of 360 copies. It is housed in a custom-made brushed aluminum slipcase. Each copy contains a colophon with the number of the edition and is signed by Sugimoto.