The eeriness of the copy: Sugimoto's portraits of wax figures
At first glance, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographic portrait of King Henry VIII of England is arresting: Sugimoto’s camera has captured the tactility of Henry’s furs and silks, the elaborate embroidery of his doublet, the light reflecting off of each shimmering jewel. The contours of the king’s face are so lifelike that he appears to be almost three-dimensional. It seems as though the 21st-century artist has traveled back in time nearly 500 years to photograph his royal subject.
But Sugimoto’s portraits of historical figures are fictions, at least twice removed from their subjects, made by photographing a wax figure that has been created by a sculptor from either a photographic portrait or a painted one. Sugimoto shoots his subjects in black and white, posing the “sitter” against a black background, amplifying the illusion that we are viewing a contemporary portrait in which the subject has stepped out of history. 
This volume presents the photographer’s images of the wax figures alongside a selection of portraits of living subjects and photographs of memento mori. As with his other major bodies of work―Dioramas, Seascapes and Theaters―Sugimoto’s Portraits address the passage of time and history, and question the nature of the “reality” captured by the camera. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Portraits is the fourth in a series of books on Sugimoto’s major bodies of work and presents 70 photographs, 7 of which have never before been published. 
Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) has helped define what it means to be a multidisciplinary contemporary artist, his photographs blurring the lines between photography, painting, installation and architecture. Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Portraits

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Damiani/MW Editions

The repetition and variation of water: an expanded edition of Sugimoto’s classic series This edition of Hiroshi Sugimoto's (born 1948) popular photography series is expanded and updated from the out-of-print first edition, including five previously unpublished photographs. For more than 30 years, Sugimoto has traveled the world photographing its seas, producing an extended meditation on the passage of time and the natural history of the earth reduced to its most basic, primordial substances: water and air. Always capturing the sea at a moment of absolute tranquility, Sugimoto has composed all the photographs identically, with the horizon line precisely bifurcating each image. The repetition of this strict format reveals the uniqueness of each meeting of sea and sky, with the horizon never appearing exactly the same way twice. The photographs are romantic yet absolutely rigorous, apparently universal but exceedingly specific. In the introduction Munesuke Mita writes, "It is clear that Sugimoto's Seascapes possess a vitality that stands in contrast to Rothko's last paintings, which took the reductionist passion of modernism―the desire to erase everything―to its extreme." Hiroshi Sugimoto has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries throughout the world, and his work is held in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; National Gallery, London; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Smithsonian, Washington, DC; and Tate, London, among others. Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Seascapes

Mita, Munesuke

The latest in Damiani and MW Editions' Sugimoto project collects his majestic images of classic modernist buildings
In 1997, Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) began a series of photographs of significant works of modernist architecture, intending “to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture.” One of the hallmarks of Sugimoto’s work is his technical mastery of the medium. He makes photographs exclusively with an 8 x 10" view camera, and his silver gelatin prints are renowned for their tonal range, total lack of grain, wealth of detail and overall optical precision. In making the Architecture photographs, however, he inverted his usual process: “Pushing out my old large-format camera’s focal length to twice-infinity ... I discovered that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testing architecture for durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process.” In this volume, which includes 19 previously unpublished images, the language of architectural modernism is distilled in photographs of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. By virtue of their blurriness and lack of color, the images strip down buildings to their essence, what we might imagine was the architect’s first, pure vision of form. The details of construction and imperfections that are a natural result of a massive, collaborative human undertaking are absent, and instead light and shadow define the forms of these buildings. The Architecture photographs continue the artist’s longstanding investigations of the passage of time and history. Are these monuments to human ingenuity and the power of the industrial age as eternal as they seem?

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Damiani/MW Editions publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Damiani/MW Editions

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Damiani/MW Editions publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Portraits

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Seascapes

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture