Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto captures a world without us
You would have to be dead to appear in one of Hiroshi Sugimoto's carefully composed works, the Japanese photographer tells Oliver Clasper
"My first traceable memory is the seascape and the sharp line made by the horizon. I was about four years old and my family and I were on a train heading to a resort for the summer. I thought how beautiful the scene was and then I realised: 'I am here. I am conscious. But who am I?' After that, my memory just fades away into the darkness."
Most children heading to the beach tend to be preoccupied with sandcastles and ice cream, but Hiroshi Sugimoto was no ordinary child. On this particular day he was experiencing a mini existential crisis and also sowing the seeds for a future project that would make him a hugely respected, and bankable, photographer.
I never hung around with my camera to search for something. That's the hunter's idea. In my case everything is pre-imagined in my noodle
To trace Sugimoto's path from a young boy growing up in post-war Japan to the artist we know today is to follow a photographer who is supremely dedicated to the classic medium of photography. For the "Seascapes" series (which he began in the early 1980s), Sugimoto used a large-format camera to capture the vast expanse of our oceans, shooting at night with long exposure times.
It was a period of deep reflection. Staring at the horizon Sugimoto often imagined himself to be anywhere, at any time. "I consider photography as a machine that allows me to go back and forth through time," he says. "As a medium though, it's only been 170 years or so since its invention. For that long, many people believed what they saw was reality, but now with the introduction of digital photography, the form has become the same as painting. You can manipulate anything you want. That's why I call digital photography a different medium. It's not photography."
Sugimoto's answer may seem curt, but he is anything but. Dressed impeccably in a light blue cotton shirt and dark blue blazer, he is soft-spoken and disarmingly polite. He's in Hong Kong to give a talk at the Asia Society's Arts and Museum Summit, and is enjoying his first few hours back in the city he last visited more than half a century ago.
"It was 1962. I was a 14-year-old high school kid," he says, chuckling at the memory. "I remember Hong Kong well, but what's this? It's totally changed. It's been destroyed. There are skyscrapers and …" The thought trails off into the distance, out to sea perhaps.
It's here that we discuss how human figures rarely feature in his work. In fact, the only "people" he has shot are waxwork models of long-dead monarchs for his "Portraits" series. Asked whether he likes to shoot portraits of living people, his answer is blackly comic: "Please die first, be turned into wax, and then come back. Usually my exposure times are around 20 minutes and at a small aperture. Nobody can sit for that long."