From July 4, 2008, the Neue Nationalgalerie dedicated the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto to the most extensive retrospective of his fascinating work to date in the German-speaking world, which was shown in Berlin as well as in Düsseldorf, Salzburg and Lucerne. The exhibition includes over 70 photographs and a sculpture by the great master of black and white photography and shows the great diversity of his groups of works, whose captivating clarity and precision immediately catch the eye.
Hiroshi Sugimoto has been working almost exclusively in the medium of black and white photography for over thirty years and creates highly precise, very calm representations that deal with questions of reality and depiction, with time, the passing and retention of time and, above all, with shadows and deal with finely nuanced gradations of gray tones. His works are concentrated, very present and engaging. In their clarity, they radiate silence and calm and sometimes appear meditative, which one would like to associate with the artist's Japanese origins. Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948 and moved in the early 1970s, first to Los Angeles and finally to New York, where he still lives and works today in addition to his residence in Tokyo.
Sugimoto always works in series that often span several years. His themes are very different, but are connected in their origins by the fact that they are never spontaneous snapshots, but rather well-considered and planned recordings that were realized with the greatest precision and technical perfection. “I’m not a hunter,” says Sugimoto, “I already have my images in my head, then I go out to realize these ideas.”