Hiroshi Sugimoto. Seascapes

For more than 30 years, Hiroshi Sugimoto has traveled the world photographing its seas, producing an extended meditation on the passage of time and the natural history of the earth reduced to its most basic, primordial substances: water and air. Always capturing the sea at a moment of absolute tranquility, Sugimoto has composed all the photographs identically, with the horizon line precisely bifurcating each image. The repetition of this strict format reveals the uniqueness of each meeting of sea and sky, with the horizon never appearing exactly the same way twice. The photographs are romantic yet absolutely rigorous, apparently universal but exceedingly specific. \nThe second in a series of luxurious, beautifully produced volumes each focused on specific bodies of Sugimoto’s work, Seascapes presents the complete series of more than 200 Seascapes for the first time in one publication. Some of the photographs included have never before been reproduced.\nHiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, where he studied politics and sociology at Rikkyo University, later retraining as an artist at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He has been active as a photographer since the 1970s. Some of his major photographic series include the Dioramas, Theaters, Portraits, Architecture and Lightning Fields. He currently lives in New York and Tokyo.