CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/7/2018

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Portraits

"Fidel Castro" (1999), Hiroshi Sugimoto's "portrait" of the Cuban revolutionary as sculpted in wax, is reproduced from Hiroshi Sugimoto: Portraits, new from Damiani and MW Editions. "For Sugimoto, photography is not just an artistic vehicle," Maria Morris Hambourg writes, "it is a philosophical instrument. From his first photographs of dioramas, the artist understood that 'photography does not exist separate from the world… but already exists as an innate perceptual tool within our mind.' Thus the end of photography for Sugimoto, if it ever actually occurs, will hardly be a full stop. His mind is so thoroughly engaged by the conceptual aspects of the medium that he will continue his investigations into the nature of history, memory, time, art, and perception. These fires of his creativity have not extinguished; rather, on the sill of his eighth decade, they are burning ever brighter, and like torches held aloft, are lighting the artist's way into surprising new domains."