Hiroshi Sugimoto

 Hiroshi Sugimoto-

Hiroshi Sugimoto is a well known black and white photographer from Tokyo. He captures highly stylised images and explores ideas and relationships between 'photography and time, art and science, imagination and reality.' Hiroshi main idea is that photos are a way of preserving a moment and picture in time almost like a time machine which is shown in his work.

Hiroshi captures different textures throughout his work from rough seascapes to completely smooth speed blurrs. The pictorial space in his images is shallow as he does not create the illusion on depth as there's is no foreground and background the images are fairly 2d. The sense of scale is very hard to work out as there are no adjacent objects to compare for scale. For example the top tow images capturing the vast open ocean the sense of scale is unknown so it manipulates the true size of it. Hiroshi shoots using a large format camera with 8 x 10 black and white film which is usually exposed for seven hours to capture the transience of time. Due to the long exposure of his images he is almost creating a time capsule by capturing a series of events.  Due to such a long exposure the objects in his images are often distorted as they blurr into the image however this creates a very interesting effect as you are unsure what you are seeing and everyone interprets the image differently. A wide tonal range of black and whites are shown across his work from a range of dark showed areas, mid tones and bright highlights of lit up areas. The effect of this is it creates a high contrast between light and ark areas which gives the image more definition and clarity. A monochromatic colour scheme has been used where the dark tones dominate. Hiroshi falls within various genres as he captures seascapes, theatres, dioramas and landscapes. The objects are mostly recognisable as vague shapes are outlines are shown where the camera has managed to focus on the moment in time for example in the bottom left image as the car zooms past. He captures objects/ scenes in a very abstract and stylised way he is also very talented in capturing atmospheres in his work. For example, the top image I find captures the horizon in a very exaggerated way making you focus only on that as it looms in the near background creating an almost eerie yet peaceful atmosphere- this is due to the monochromatic and dull lighting the image The photographer has a very deliberate tone of voice as his aim is capturing speed and moments and freezing it in a moment of time- he carries this theme throughout his work. Overall I feel very inspired by Hiroshi Sugimoto's outstanding work and his ideas of capturing time which is an idea I would like to explore in my work. 

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