Birds of Japan

Hiroshi Sugimoto began his first major series of photographs in the mid-1970s. Working at natural history museums, he photographed dioramas so that no traces of the museum setting remain and the images might at first be mistaken for actual natural scenes. In some cases the artifice is more obvious than others.

Over time Sugimoto has expanded his repertoire through other long-term series, including modern architecture, and Buddhist sculpture. For each series, he develops a strong concept for how best to depict a subject and then devises a standard methodology to enact that idea. He always uses a large-format camera, works in black-and-white, and makes impeccable prints (he feels that “if you don’t see the grain you can get inside the images”).