Product Description

Known for his long-exposure photographic series of empty movie theaters and drive-ins, seascapes, museum dioramas, and waxworks, Hiroshi Sugimoto has been turning his camera on international icons of 20th-century architecture since 1997. His deliberately blurred and seemingly timeless photographs depict structures as diverse as the Empire State Building, Le Corbusier's Chapel de Nôtre Dame du Haut, and Tadao Ando's Church of Light in Osaka. The resulting black-and-white photographs, shot distinctly out of focus and from unusual angles, are not attempts at documentation but rather evocation--meant to isolate the buildings from their contexts, allowing them to exist as dreamlike, uninhabited ideals. Among the other buildings represented in the series are Philippe Starck's Asahi Breweries, Fumihiko Maki's Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium, the United Nations Building, the Chrysler Building, Giuseppi Terragni's Santelia Monument Como, the World Trade Center, Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, Antonio Gaudí's Casa Batlló II, the 1922 Schindler House, and buildings by Frank Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many others in Europe, North America, and Asia. I'm trying to recreate the imaginative visions of the architecture before the architect built the building, so I can trace back the original vision from the finished product. --Hiroshi Sugimoto

Essays by Francesco Bonami, John Yau and Marco de Michelis.
Foreword by Robert Fitzpatrick.

Hardcover ,10.75 x 12 in., 168 pages, 68 Tritone illustrations

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #491335 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-02
• Released on: 2003-03-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 168 pages

About the Author
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. He studied photography at the Center College of Design in Los Angeles before moving to New York in the 70s. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Berkeley Art Museum, California; the 10th Biennial of Sydney, Australia; capc Musée de l'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux; the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Customer Reviews

Will delight fans of photography
Hiroshi Sugimoto is known for his long-exposure photos of empty movie theaters and museums: his blurred masterpieces of public places depict both familiar, major structures and lesser-known buildings. Sugimoto: Architecture is an impressive collection of his art offers full-page unsullied black and white reproductions of his finest works and will delight fans of photography, architectural representation, and the Sugimoto style in particular.

Dreamlike
Sugimoto's photographs are shot and printed so that the ordinary becomes surreal, something no quite of this earth. They are like abstract shapes and have a painterly feel reminding you of something familiar. This is a large and thick book and nicely printed for fans of contemporary photography.

Gentle Abstraction
The photographs in Hiroshi Sugimoto's "Architecture" are the gentlest of abstract art. Although the subjects have been reduced to the simplest of forms, they are still recognizable and there are no modifying or distracting elements added,

The pictures are all of iconic architecture, ranging across history from the entrance to the temple of Dendur at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, through the structures of Le Corbusier and Wright, to Gehry. The pictures are all taken from classic angles, either head on, or at 45 degrees to the structures. The pictures are all in black-and-white with deliberately blown out highlights and shadows that seldom reach into absolute black. (This light range is not the range of the American photographers of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century who prescribed a range of light from absolute black to white with the barest of specular highlights. Rather, to speak in digital terms, it's as if the entire histogram had been shifted to the right.). Most noticeably, all of the pictures are deliberately out of focus to the point where the subject is recognizable but few distinguishing surface features appear. These are elemental forms.

Sugimoto has said that he used this technique because many of the structures were time-worn and he wanted to reduce them to their basic forms. He certainly has done this and those familiar with architecture will recognize the structures without reference to the captions. Other people, including some of the essayists whose works introduce the book, have found much deeper meaning in these photographs. A good work of art often leads the mind to wander into speculation about meaning, and often the speculation reveals as much about the speculator as the art.

One may very well ask whether the book is about photography or architecture, but I suspect the photographer might answer that it is about seeing.

Another question one might ask is whether these images, which are so much alike, can survive regular scrutiny. I felt that, having read the book, I got the point and had no need for further examination at this time, although I did reexamine the pictures again and again, looking for additional meaning. On the other hand, I suspect that if I returned to this work in five years, when I had more experience, I might find something new.