Master photographer, antiquarian, disciple of mathematics, self-proclaimed unlicensed architect and master of forgery; septuagenarian polymath Hiroshi Sugimoto is in Sydney for the opening of his largest-ever retrospective. The Museum of Contemporary Art is the centrepiece of his aptly titled show Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, which debuted at London’s Hayward Gallery last year and is scheduled to conclude at Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in 2025.
For the Tokyo-born, New York-based artist, the camera is the ultimate time machine; a tool with endless possibilities for subversion and ambiguity.
“All my ideas come from my inner mind, from my brain,” he says. “A photographer usually hunts around and finds something to photograph, but I hunt around in my mind and find something to photograph — that’s the uniqueness of my photography.”
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A meticulous dedication to the technical art of photography and a Zen-like patience and willingness to persevere characterize much of Sugimoto’s art over the past five decades. Some of it, however, has been born out of sheer stubbornness.
He spent nearly eight years petitioning the Japanese government and the administrators of Kyoto’s Sanjūsangen-dō temple before he was allowed to enter the 12th-century complex, which houses 1,001 statues of Kannon, the thousand-armed goddess of compassion, just before dawn. Sugimoto removed all signs of modernity from the building—fluorescent lights, emergency exit signs—and captured the moment the midsummer sun first peeked over the mountains and shone into the temple.
His meticulous work is highly sought after: after flying to the French Riviera in a private jet, he turned down a request from U2’s Bono to photograph the Mediterranean Sea as seen from his estate as part of his ongoing Seascapes series – because the rock star had asked him that.
“It was a beautiful sea, but I said [to Bono]”It’s such a shame. If you hadn’t asked me, I might have done it… but I’m not a commercial photographer,” he says.
Despite this, the two men became good friends. U2’s 2009 album No Line on the Horizon featured a photograph of Sugimoto of the Baltic Sea. The artist gave strict orders that nothing be included in the image; the album was released without any text identifying the artist or even the album’s name. (A reciprocal agreement allows Sugimoto to use the album’s title track as he wishes in exhibiting his Seascapes series.)
The MCA exhibition is organized roughly chronologically, beginning with Sugimoto’s Diorama series from 1976. It was a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York that inspired Sugimoto, then 28 and working as an antiques dealer, to “make the fake real” by photographing the museum’s famous animal displays in ways that seemingly resurrected their long-dead inhabitants in their synthetic environments.
His technical mastery is evident in one of his most recognizable images, Polar Bear. Shot on a large-format camera, he used a black reflector and continuously adjusted the exposure over 20 minutes to achieve an almost 3D-like contrast between the myriad shades of white in the bear’s fur and his snowy Arctic surroundings.
“He walked into the museum, squinted, and realized that through the camera lens he could create something that was unreal,” says MCA curator Megan Robson. “By bringing that bear back to life, he realized he was an artist.”
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Sugimoto’s fascination with 19th-century precursors to modern photography continued in his Portraits series, which saw him photograph people from Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn to Queen Elizabeth II and Diana, Princess of Wales – in wax museums like Madame Tussauds. By removing the wax models from their contextual surroundings and placing them in front of black backgrounds, the artist added a layer of ambiguity, breathing life into inanimate objects.
“I make fantasy into reality, and people like to believe it,” Sugimoto says with pleasure. “They say, ‘Wow, Hiroshi took a picture of Princess Diana.’ But it’s all dead – it’s a wax figure. If people believe in it, they have to ask themselves what reality is, when they can look at fake things and feel alive.”
Science, mathematics and architecture intersect in all his work. In his 1970s series Theaters he condensed entire feature films into a single image, resulting in an eerie glow that radiates from the proscenium arches of a Parisian rococo theatre or an abandoned New York Art Deco stage.
In Mathematical Models, Sugimoto took 19th-century German models used as teaching aids to convey three-dimensional qualities to mathematical equations and created a series of images in which the scale of the objects, in reality no taller than 30 cm, towers over the viewer. The white plaster, papier-mâché, wood, wire, rope, and metal models that Sugimoto encountered in Tokyo in 2002 captivated him in the same way that Man Ray had been captivated more than half a century earlier after seeing similar models in Paris.
“I thought, I can do something different, or even better than Man Ray,” Sugimoto says. He took it to the next level, using state-of-the-art technology to create human-scale sculptures—they’re still mathematical models, he gently corrects—and, most recently, a 70-foot-tall version that’s now a public artwork in San Francisco; an earlier, smaller incarnation is on view at the MCA.
“I’m still working on the art of photography, but now in three dimensions,” he says.
In his Lightning Fields series, he applied electrical charges to unprinted sheets of film, initially using an 18th-century hand-held electrostatic machine developed by Benjamin Franklin and Michael Faraday. He refined the technique by submerging the sheets in water during the discharge and using natural salts from the Himalayas, Hawaii, and Japan to create lightning-like patterns on the paper that almost resemble dramatic landscapes.
And in his Opticks series, he took Isaac Newton’s treatise proving that white light was made up of several different colors—a precursor to the invention of photography—and used Polaroid cameras to capture the natural winter light in his Tokyo studio, funneling it through glass prisms. The resulting photographs bear a striking resemblance to Mark Rothko’s signature rectangular abstractions.
Sugimoto, now 76, says, “90% of my life is over… but I’m starting to feel good about the way history passes from one generation to the next.”
He is working on what he thinks will be his last long-term project at the Odawara Art Foundation, which he founded just outside Tokyo. “So I’ll just keep making it,” he says. “And if I die, that’s the end of my art.”