"Hiroshi Sugimoto: 2001 Hasselblad Foundation Award Winner"
2001-10-20 until 2002-01-06
Hasselblad Center
Göteborg, , SE

The Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is the recipient of the Hasselblad Award, 2001. The prize ceremony in Göteborg in October will be accompanied by a retrospective of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work with his recent series, Portraits, from 1999 and not previously shown in Scandinavia, figuring as its main focus.

Hiroshi Sugimoto numbers today among the most highly regarded photographers of our time. In pursuing his main themes – the fluidity of the boundaries separating the domains of history, art, religion and science – Sugimoto has succeeded in melding contemplative elements from the East with cultural motifs from the West.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Japan in 1948. Educated at St Paul’s University in Tokyo, he left Japan in 1970 in order to study photography at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, at a time when Minimalism and Conceptual Art were gaining ground in the USA. Both movements found in Sugimoto an avid exponent and his work continues to evidence their influence.

Ever since his first project, Dioramas, embarked upon in 1976, Sugimoto has worked on extended series. The series Theaters, beginning in 1978 and continuing to the present day, involved Sugimoto’s photographing American movie theaters from the 1920s and ‘30s. The making of exposures using a large-format camera throughout the entire showing of a movie enabled Sugimoto to catch both screen and the movie theater interior on film. This resulted in photographs showing the screen metamorphosed into a brilliant white portal opening onto infinity.

IMAGE:
Hiroshi Sugimoto,
Guggenheim Museum–
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1997

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