Acclaimed Japanese contemporary photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has been taking and creating photographs for 48 years now and is still bemused by the trust people continue to place in the camera.

Speaking in Sydney ahead of the opening of his largest retrospective to date, Sugimoto recalls conversations he’s had about his Portraits series, which includes portraits spanning 500 years of icons such as Henry VIII, Napoleon, Princess Diana and Anne Boleyn.

“People are amazed, they say, ‘Oh you were able to photograph Napoleon?’ Guess how old I am!’” Sugimoto says, chuckling. “The problem is people never doubt the photography.”

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This ongoing trust in photography and the medium’s power to influence and intrigue, seemingly shifting time and memory, continues to fascinate Sugimoto, a multi-award-winning artist whose work features in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate galleries in the UK; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Sugimoto’s native Tokyo, among many others.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine spans Sugimoto’s career, from his earliest work in 1976 to his most recent in 2018, and includes almost 100 photographs and sculptures drawn from international museums and the artist’s own collection. A collaboration with London’s Hayward Gallery and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, the exhibition is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art until late October.

The exhibition is as thought-provoking, awe-inspiring and playful as the man himself, his vast body of work reflecting his unending curiosity about the world around him and our place within it, extending from nature to art and its intersections with religion and science.

Sugimoto’s eerily lifelike series, Dioramas, is where it all began, when Sugimoto understood the camera could distort reality and perception, reminding us photography can both document and invent. This occurred to Sugimoto in 1974 when, newly arrived in New York City having studied at a fine arts college in California, he was struck by the image of a stuffed polar bear towering over its fresh kill amid an icy landscape at the American Museum of Natural History.

In fact, the scene was a Victorian-era diorama, the polar bear long dead and stuffed, ditto its prey, but Sugimoto noticed if he closed one eye, the image seemed to spring to life.

“If I see this diorama dead – [but] to me, live – let’s make a proof, let’s photograph it to make my vision physical,” Sugimoto says. “I showed it to the people and they believed it and [said], ‘How brave you are to be so near the polar bear!’”

Sugimoto sought permission to shoot not just the polar bear, but multiple dioramas of hyenas, wolves and ostriches, using an old large-format camera and black and white film.

“My life as an artist began the moment I saw I had succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film,” he says.

This uncannily realistic photography is on display again in Sugimoto’s Portraits series – in reality, photographs of waxwork effigies from London’s Madame Tussauds.

This curiosity and hypothetical approach to his life and art have influenced Sugimoto since he was a little boy growing up in Tokyo. One of his most well-known series, Seascapes (1980–ongoing) is a lifelong project that explores time and memory. Depicting expanses of ocean and sky across the globe (even Tasmania), Seascapes captures perfectly still painting-like renders of sea and sky, sunshine and moonlight, a result of the photographer’s unerring patience as he waits hours on end for a frame void of waves, clouds, birds, boats – and indeed, any human existence.

“I’m always questioning myself, ‘What if? What if I was the first human here?’ [So I positioned myself as the first human] standing on the seashore looking at the seascape and wondering, ‘What is this place? Who am I?’ and memory starts from there,” he says, adding his first childhood memory was a seascape, so the series is “a history of human consciousness”.

Other popular series include Theaters, photographs shot in empty, early-20th-century American movie palaces in which Sugimoto captures an entire movie in one single frame, and Opticks, inspired by Newton’s discovery that natural light wasn’t purely white but seven distinct colours; it’s a room full of vivid photographs, a rare departure from Sugimoto’s signature black and white.

“Over the last 50 years Hiroshi Sugimoto has created some of the most influential images in contemporary art, [he’s] somebody who has helped define the way we look at the world, through his photographs … and helped define the way we understand the power of photography,” says MCA director of curatorial and digital, Lara Strongman.

At 76 Sugimoto continues to work, creating what he refers to as his “final major body of work”, at the Enoura Observatory, part of his Odawara Art Foundation in Kanagawa.

“This is my last work, my last piece. Until I die, I keep expanding, I keep making it, but it’s costing a lot of money so I keep working hard,” he says with a smile.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, until October 27, 2024.

mca.com.au