Artist Analysis #4

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Polar Bear 1976

Hiroshi Sugimoto is a photographer from Tokyo Japan. Much of his work is very simple, with little actually going on in the image. He takes long exposures with an 8x10 large format camera. Sugimoto gets much of his influence from artists such as Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaist, and Surrealist movements, as well as from modern architecture. He has a huge and very diverse body of work, based on many different themes. One series he did was of pictures of old drive in theaters, another was of animals in natural history museums, also Japanese architecture, and electrical charges. His aim for his photos is to reveal time passing, which can be portrayed in many different ways, through blurring, long exposures, or exist in something deeper within the photo.

The photo above is from his natural history series and shows a polar bear on an ice shelf cautiously approaching what looks to be a dead seal laying on the ground. Hiroshi is known for his ability of creating real looking scenes from something fake. This image in particular is extremely hard to tell if it's real and fake. The ice behind the seal has recently cracked and creates a line pointing directly towards the seal which helps to move the viewers eyes around the image. It also has great balance dividing the scene essentially in two, with the seal on one side and the polar bear on the other. For this photo, he a process in which you print on silver gelatin. Because of the nature of shooting in such a bright place like this, he most likely took this opportunity to use a very small aperture opening in order to include everything in focus and create depth within the image. This would have allowed him to leave the shutter at a slower speed.