Hiroshi Sugimoto groups his photographic researches in thematic cycles that develop over a long period. He investigates into the photographic medium itself, and time by focusing both on the working procedure and the choice of subjects, in an attempt to crystallize in a shot an instant as well as a vision.

In a solo exhibition designed specially for the architecture of the Kunsthaus Bregenz showed photographs from three series of works by the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. During his studies of art, Sugimoto, who left Japn in 1970 and went to Los Angeles, was influenced by American Minimal- and Concept Art. This is revealed not only in the serial nature of his photographs, but above all in the reduction and concentration of the pictorial vocabulary which gives his subjects the aura of quiet and timelessness which distinguishes his photographic work.

Impressed by Peter Zumthor's architecture, Sugimoto decided to present 21 photographs from the series of the Seascapes and 13 photographs from the Architecture series for the first time in large format. The monumental group Pinetrees was created especially for the Bregenz exhibition and is based on the tradition of Japanese painting.

“Noh such Thing as Time
What I have attempted to show via the medium of photography is an ancient level of human memory. Whether individual memory or cultural memory or the collective memory of humanity as a whole, the idea is to go back in time to remember where we came from, how we came to be. As for myself, my own memories seem to plumb some interminable, dim and hazy primordial chaos from which issues a thin threadlike strand. Grappling my own way along, I am dragged down to the sunless depths of the sea, yet I am sure the line connects to something somewhere far off. The other end of the thread is ‘now’, but somehow the strand keeps stretching out and that far end of memory gets further and further away.”
- Hiroshi Sugimoto

Published on the occasion of the 2001 exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto, Architecture of Time, curated by Rudolf Sagmeister, at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
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Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948) is a Japanese photographer. He graduated from Saint Paul’s University in Tokyo and subsequently from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.
He lives and works between Tokyo and New York.