On the Beach

In 1990, photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto visited the seas of New Zealand. On one particular deserted beach, he discovered hundreds of car parts, probably from the 1960s, disintegrated and corroded by decades under the waves. Photographing them individually, he imagined that human civilization had ended, thinking that the sight of crafted objects rotting away is at once dreadful and beautiful. This series of heavily black-and-white images of decaying metal on the sand are reproduced in this large-format photo book, accompanied by an introspective text by Sugimoto on the nature of the sea and the inexorable, practically incomprehensible, passage of time.