PROVENANCE:

Sugimoto Studio, New York

Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles

ILLUSTRATED:

Joe. Photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, Missouri, 2006, color illustrated

Sugimoto is an accomplished architect, and has always been interested in modern architecture. In 2003, Sugimoto visited the new Pulitzer Foundation of the Arts in St. Louis, USA to take photographs of the architecture. However, he was immediately captivated by one of the commissioned sculptures "Joe" by the artist Richard Serra. The name "Joe" was in honor of Joseph Pulitzer Jr..

Sugimoto's photographs of "Joe" and the sculpture itself are matching creations. Using soft light, and blurred darkness, the works such as the present one, seem in themselves to be like sculptures. The worlds of photography and sculpture coincide, and the two dimensionality of the photographs seems to capture the three dimensionality of the actual sculpture.

Sugimoto used a relatively short exposure time for the "Joe" photographs. A traditional camera can focus to infinity, however the large format camera he uses can focus to a double infinity, resulting in a blurry, hazy background which contributes so successfully to the visual effectiveness of the photographs. As a craftsman with the camera, Sugimoto has reached back to the earliest photographers who understood implicitly the feeling and effect of light on surfaces. Light changes every second, and so the master photographic craftsman develops an innate sense of the changes that will occur as time passes, and will anticipate and prepare for the exact moment he wishes to capture. He will have already chosen the right F-stop and shutter speed for the golden moment. For Sugimoto, this must be done by the artist not later on a computer. Only an artist intimately involved with his subject can capture the essence, the spirit of the subject at the precise, correct moment for posterity. Sugimoto develops all his own photographs by hand in his studio ensuring the artistic integrity of each work.

A special exhibition of nineteen of them was held in the Pulitzer Foundation in 2006. The true complement of a unified artistic vision was fully realized, the photographs, the sculpture, the architecture and the book. The exhibition was greatly lauded, and received major critical acclaim. The present photograph "Joe" is one of the sublime works from this series.