Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in 1948 in Japan, and divides his time between Tokyo and New York City. Primarily a photographer since the 1970s, Sugimoto more recently added performing arts production and architecture to his multidisciplinary practice, which deals with history and temporal existence by investigating themes of time, empiricism, and metaphysics. Grounded in technical mastery of the classical photographic tradition, his work has explored the ways photography can record traces of invisible but elemental forces.
Sugimoto’s major series include Dioramas, Theaters, Seascapes, Portraits, Architecture, Colors of Shadow, Conceptual Forms, and Lightning Fields, among others. His photographs are in the collections of prominent museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Gallery, London; and many more.
His work has been the subject of numerous monographs, and Hiroshi Sugimoto has been the recipient of prizes and awards including the National Arts Club Medal of Honor in Photography (2018); The Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal (2017); Isamu Noguchi Award (2014); Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2013); Praemium Imperiale Award for Painting (2009); PHotoEspaña Prize (2006); Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2001); and the International Center of Photography’s Fifteenth Annual Infinity Award (1999). He is a recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1980) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1982). In 2017, he founded the Odawara Art Foundation, dedicated to traditional Japanese and international contemporary performing arts.
