Portfolios

In this series, Hiroshi Sugimoto investigates the scientific origins of photography. In 1834, William Henry Fox Talbot produced some of the very first photograms on sensitized paper, setting a variety of botanical specimens directly on the paper’s surface and exposing the paper to sunlight. These experiments eventually yielded rudimentary paper negatives made from a camera obscura. Talbot, however, never created positive prints from many of his negatives. Alongside many prominent museums, Sugimoto is also a collector of Talbot’s early negatives, and by making photographs of these fragile, delicate objects, Sugimoto aims to at last share these very early images with the world.

In this series, Hiroshi Sugimoto again brings his interest in mathematics and science into the visual realm. “Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions,” Sugimoto has commented. Here, the artist has photographed a series of mathematical models, all of which are sculptural renderings of trigonometric functions. Fabricated in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, they are now owned by the University of Tokyo.