Hiroshi Sugimoto has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries throughout the world, and his work is held in many prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the National Gallery, London; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Smithsonian, Washington, DC; and the Tate, London, among others.Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in 1948 in Tokyo. He took his earliest photographs in high school, photographing film footage of Audrey Hepburn as it played in a movie theater. After receiving a BA from Saint Paul’s University in Tokyo in 1970, he traveled west, first encountering communist countries such as the Soviet Union and Poland, and later Western Europe. In 1971, he visited Los Angeles and decided to stay, receiving a BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in 1972. In 1974, he moved to New York where he currently resides, dividing his time between New York and Tokyo. In 1976 he visited the city’s American Museum of Natural History for the first time and he was intrigued by the lifelike qualities of the dioramas of animals and people. These provided the subject matter for the first of his Dioramas series, which, along with the Seascapes and Theaters series (deadpan, near-abstract photographs of such sites), were conceived between 1976 and 1977 and have continued through the present. He has since developed other ongoing series, including photographs of waxwork-museum figures, drive-in theaters, and Buddhist sculptures, all of which similarly blur distinctions between the real and the fictive. In Praise of Shadows (1998) is a series of photographs based on Gerhard Richter’s paintings of burning candles. His Architecture series (2000–03) consists of blurred images of well-known examples of Modernist architecture. In 2004, Sugimoto began to photograph Richard Serra‚Äôs torqued spiral sculpture Joe, exploring the work‚Äôs dynamic viewpoints and dramatic manipulations of light and shadow; for the publication of this suite of photographs, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer contributed an adjacent textual component. The series Conceptual Forms (also 2004) takes up the subject of Industrial Revolution-era mechanical models used to demonstrate the movements of the rapidly advancing machines of the day. Favoring black-and-white, Sugimoto has continued to use the same camera, a turn-of-the-century box camera, throughout his career. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the following institutions: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2018); Nagasaki Prefectural Museum, Nagasaki, Japan (2018); Palace of Versailles, France (2018); Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels (2018); The Japan Society, New York (2017); Chateau Le Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France (2017); Fondazione Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2017); MOA, Museum of Art, Atami, Japan (2017); Casa Garriga I Nogués, Barcelona; Recoletos Exhibition Hall, Madrid (2016); and Phillips Collectioni, Washington D.C. (2015). Sugimoto has had solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Osaka (1989), Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1994), Centre International d’Art Contemporain in Montreal (1995), Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1996), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2000), Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2000), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2003), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (2006), and Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2008), among other venues. He has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions, among them The Art of Memory/The Loss of History at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (1985), Carnegie International (1991), Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky at the Yokohama Museum of Art and Guggenheim Museum SoHo (1994), Prospect 96 at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (1996), Johannesburg Biennale (1997), International Triennale of Contemporary Art in Yokohama (2001), Moving Pictures (2002) and Singular Forms (2004) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Reality Check at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2008). He received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1980 and the National Endowment for the Arts (Washington D.C.) in 1982. In 2001, he won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography.Sugimoto’s masterful photographs exemplify both the craftsman’s will to visual beauty and perfection, and an incisive exploration of philosophical notions of space and time, imagination and reality, science and history. Drawing on the classical photographic tradition, Sugimoto creates distilled, meditative images which unite the concrete and abstract, and contain meaningful conceptual underpinnings which seek to materialize the ‘invisible realm of the mind’ and the unconscious. In his process, Sugimoto seeks to comprehend the nature of perception, exploring duration and temporality through photography, and an understanding of how radical shifts through the past enlighten the present.In the late 1970s, as Hiroshi Sugimoto was defining his artistic voice, he posed a question to himself: “Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame?” The answer that came to him: “You get a shining screen.” For almost four decades, Sugimoto has been photographing the interiors of theaters using a large-format camera and no lighting other than the projection of the running movie. He opens the aperture when a film begins and closes it when it ends. In the resulting images, the screen becomes a luminous white box and the ambient light subtly brings forward the rich architectural details of these spaces.Sugimoto began by photographing the classic movie palaces built in the 1920s and ‘30s, their ornate architectural elements a testament to the cultural importance of the burgeoning movie industry. He continued the series with drive-in theaters. In the last decade, Sugimoto has photographed historic theaters in Europe as well as disused theaters that show the ravages of time. Taken together, these photographs present an extended meditation on the passage of time, a recurring theme in his artwork.”I wanted to photograph a movie, with all its appearance of life and motion, in order to stop it again.... My dream was to capture 170,000 photographs on a single frame of film. The image I had inside my brain was of a gleaming white screen inside a dark movie theater. The light created by an excess of 170,000 exposures would be the embodiment or manifestation of something awe-inspiring and divine." - Hiroshi Sugimoto.