Hiroshi Sugimoto

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 Ntre 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 Gaud's Casa Batll 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.