More on Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. In 1970, Sugimoto studied politics and sociology at St. Paul’s University in Tokyo. Two years later, in 1972, he retrained as an artist and received his BFA in Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California. Afterward, Sugimoto settled in New York City. Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death.


For his 2009 series Lightning Fields he abandoned the use of the camera, producing photographs using a 400,000 volt Van de Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto the film.^[1] The highly detailed results combine bristling textures and branching sparks into highly evocative images.

“

I try to never be satisfied; this way I will always be challenging my spirit.[2]

”