Hiroshi Sugimoto - TIME MACHINE

A major retrospective volume published by Berlin’s Hatje Cantz, encompassing the 50-year career of renowned Japanese artist and photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.

This comprehensive monograph highlights his seminal series:

• Dioramas: taxidermy animals set against painted backdrops, transformed through camera optics and visual illusion into seemingly genuine wild landscapes.

• Architecture: iconic 20th-century buildings deliberately captured out of focus to trace the pure, unrefined concepts that first flickered in the architects' minds.

• Theaters and Drive-Ins: long-exposure photographs of movie screens, encapsulating flowing time into a single radiant mass of light.

• Seascapes: stark, minimalist compositions dividing sky and sea equally, stripped of all human presence to capture the primeval horizons once gazed upon by ancient human ancestors.

Through these series, Sugimoto continuously shakes the foundational concepts of "reality", "time", and "memory" that we so often take for granted. This volume brings into sharp focus his role as a philosopher using the medium of photography to explore the grand, endless question of human consciousness and its origins.

Note: The work "Boden Sea, Uttwil" from the Seascapes series—shown in the 2nd photo—was selected as the cover artwork for U2’s 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon.

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