Hiroshi Sugimoto

This 368-page Hatje Cantz monograph is the catalogue for the retrospective that gave Hiroshi Sugimoto his fullest institutional survey to date. It remains the standard English-language career overview of his work.

Kerry Brougher organized the exhibition for the Hirshhorn Museum and David Elliott organized it for the Mori Art Museum. It traveled from Tokyo (September 2005 – January 2006) to Washington, D.C. (February – May 2006). The book follows its structure through Sugimoto's key bodies of work: the taxidermy tableaux of the Dioramas, the long exposures of empty movie-palace and drive-in screens in Theaters, the horizon-line minimalism of Seascapes, the uncannily lifelike wax-museum figures of Portraits, and the deliberately out-of-focus buildings of his architecture series. Designed by Takaaki Matsumoto, the oversized hardcover reproduces the plates at a scale close to the artist's own large-format prints. Accompanying essays situate each series within Sugimoto's decades-long interest in photography's relationship to time, memory, and historical representation.

Sugimoto (b. 1948, Tokyo) has lived and worked in New York since the early 1970s. He is among the most widely collected photographers of his generation, represented in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim. This monograph predates his later series (Lightning Fields, Photogenic Drawings) but remains the most complete single-volume account of the work that established his reputation.