Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture
Category: Photographer Monographs & Art Books
Reviews: star star star star star
Publisher: Damiani
Publication Date: 2019
Print Length: 160 pages
Language: English
Price: paid paid paid

The latest in Damiani and MW Editions' Sugimoto project collects his majestic images of classic modernist buildings.

In 1997, Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) began a series of photographs of significant works of modernist architecture, intending “to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture.” One of the hallmarks of Sugimoto’s work is his technical mastery of the medium. He makes photographs exclusively with an 8 x 10" view camera, and his silver gelatin prints are renowned for their tonal range, total lack of grain, wealth of detail and overall optical precision. In making the Architecture photographs, however, he inverted his usual process: “Pushing out my old large-format camera’s focal length to twice-infinity ... I discovered that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testing architecture for durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process.”

In this volume, which includes 19 previously unpublished images, the language of architectural modernism is distilled in photographs of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. By virtue of their blurriness and lack of color, the images strip down buildings to their essence, what we might imagine was the architect’s first, pure vision of form. The details of construction and imperfections that are a natural result of a massive, collaborative human undertaking are absent, and instead light and shadow define the forms of these buildings. The Architecture photographs continue the artist’s longstanding investigations of the passage of time and history. Are these monuments to human ingenuity and the power of the industrial age as eternal as they seem?

Selected Books by This Photographer

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine

2024 - Hatje Cantz

Hiroshi Sugimoto


Hiroshi Sugimoto: Theaters

2016 - Damiani

Hiroshi Sugimoto


Hiroshi Sugimoto: Seascapes

2015 - Damiani

Hiroshi Sugimoto


Dioramas

2014 - Damiani

Hiroshi Sugimoto


On the beach

2014 - Amana

Hiroshi Sugimoto


Hiroshi Sugimoto: Nature of Light

2011 - Ram Distribution

Hiroshi Sugimoto

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto

2010 - Hatje Cantz

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Kerry Brougher

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Portraits

2003 - Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tracey Bashkoff

 

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