Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine – (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A new, comprehensive survey of Sugimoto’s five-decade career, from grand dioramas and seascapes to eerie portraits of wax effigies and more

Through his expansive exploration of the possibilities of still images, Hiroshi Sugimoto has created some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time–pictures that are meticulously crafted and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalizingly ambiguous. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is a comprehensive survey of work produced over the past five decades, featuring selections from all of Sugimoto’s major series, as well as lesser-known works that illuminate his innovative, conceptually driven approach to making pictures.
Texts by international writers, artists and scholars?including Geoffrey Batchen, Edmund de Waal, Mami Kataoka, Ralph Rugoff, Lara Strongman and Margaret Wertheim?highlight his work’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into the nature of representation and art, our understanding of time and memory, and the paradoxical character of photography as a medium so well suited to both documenting and invention.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries throughout the world, and his work is held in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; National Gallery, London; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Smithsonian, Washington, DC; and Tate, London, among others. Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City.

Review Quotes

Records made in and of time, these images nonetheless float free of their given moment, showing us what the world looked like before we existed, as it seems, and perhaps even what it will look like when we are no longer there.–Laura Cummings “Guardian”

His work has stretched and rearranged concepts of time, space and light that are integral to the medium.–Westall Mark “FAD”

Wonder is at the heart of it: a wonder at nature, man and creature, all through time, but also at the strangeness of photography itself. For these are pictures of what photographs may also be – the half-caught memory, the ghost in the machine, the shadow in time’s eye.–Laura Cummings “Guardian”