While reading this morning, I came across an Q&A article with Hiroshi Sugimoto from I.D. Magazine. After reading the article I wanted to acquaint myself with his photographs, so I went to his website. What beautiful images! I love the explanations of why he photographed the sometimes unusual things he did.
About Hiroshi Sugimoto:
Sugimoto began his work with "Dioramas" in 1976 a series in which he photographed displays in natural history museums. The cultural assumption that cameras always show us reality tricks many viewers into assuming the animals in the photos are real until they examine the pictures carefully. His series "Portraits", begun in 1999, is based on a similar idea. In that series, Sugimoto photographs wax figures of Henry VIII an his wives. These wax figures are based on portraits from the 1500s and when taking the picture Sugimoto attempts to recreate the lighting that would have been used by the painter.
If you don't have time to read the article here's a few questions and answers I particularly liked:
What qualities attract you to a particular building?
The subject has to be an icon of modernist architecture so that I can trace the history of modernism itself. I once shot an Egyptian temple at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it came out quite well. But before modernism, architecture and design served religious purposes or political powers. Only in the 20th century did design become oriented to the individual and serve nothing other than the building's inhabitants.
How do you research your subjects?
I find as many pictures of the building taken by other photographers as I can, to get a clear idea of the most common perception of it. Then I just re-create that established, idealized view. I'm looking at the buildings as historical phenomena; I'm curious about why they became famous. I'm not trying to show my own taste.
Which buildings would you still be interested in photographing?
Many architects offer theirs, but I can shoot only the work of dead architects. The building itself has to have a conceptual core—weak buildings that are only about what's on the surface cannot survive my out-of-focus approach; they just melt. Since I'm taking fewer photographs now, I'm moving toward making real things in real space. I built a shrine on Naoshima Island in Japan after extensive study of the Ise shrine style. The space we're in now is another of my experimental architecture projects. I'm photographing it as a part of the retrospective and making public editions. When I design a space, I start with an abstract composition in my mind. Then I construct it.
Below are some images from Hiroshi's website:
Image and text copyright Hiroshi Sugimoto, I.D. Magazine and Wikipedia
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