Hiroshi Sugimoto At ARTCENTER In Pasadena, CA: The Power Of ‘What If?’

"If you want to take a beautiful picture, take a picture of something that is beautiful," was a famous teaching of Charlie Potts, ArtCenter College of Design 's first chair and founder of their photo department.

Photographer and artist Matthew Rolston, an ArtCenter graduate, and current faculty member who studied under Potts, read this quote aloud recently when presenting ArtCenter's Lifetime Achievement Alumni Award to another of its graduates (and student of Charlie Potts), the photographic and architecture artist Hiroshi Sugimoto at a recent dinner event on campus.

Actually, the award was announced in 2021 but due to the pandemic and Sugimoto's own busy schedule, the in-person presentation only occurred in late October, at which time Sugimoto appeared on campus for a conversation with journalist Jori Finkel, introduced by ArtCenter President Karen Hoffman, and Everard Williams who chairs the photo and imaging department. In honor of the artist, The South Campus' gallery space exhibited a small but beautiful collection of Sugimoto's work from the collection of ArtCenter Graduate and Trustee Phillip Sarofim and Lisson Gallery (which was on view through November 3). And on November 15, Lisson Gallery Los Angeles presents the American debut of Brush Impression, Heart Sutra, Sugimoto's calligraphic/photographic and spiritual works.

Hiroshi Sugimoto has made works of art and architecture that are conceptual in nature and that challenge our notions of time, what is real, even what a photo is; in his architecture, even our fundamental notion of where rooms should be, and what a garden can be, are challenged. Sugimoto invites us, as one person at the event said, "to see beyond."

However, to understand Sugimoto, you need to understand ArtCenter in Pasadena.

ArtCenter was founded in 1930 by Advertising executive Edward "Tink" Adams because he wasn't satisfied by the work of the recent art school graduates he hired. Instead, Adams decided to start a decidedly vocational school that would teach artists, designers, and other creatives for roles in advertising, publishing, and industrial design.

ArtCenter was originally a school of 12 teachers and eight students located on Seventh Street in downtown Los Angeles. However, following World War Two enrollment increased to the point where they needed a larger building, which they found on Third Street.

ArtCenter quickly became known for its Automotive Design department creating a pipeline for talent that continues to this day and is reflected in the designs by graduates at most major Auto brands including Acura, Hyundai, Bentley, BMW, and Tesla.

By 1950, ArtCenter was a four-year college with degrees in Industrial Design, Photography, Illustration and Advertising. Over the next decades, ArtCenter expanded its undergraduate departments to offer Fine Art, Film, Industrial Design, Environmental Design, Spatial Design, and Media Design, as well as offering Graduate programs in Design.

In 1976, Art Center relocated, once again, to its Hillside Campus on 165 wooded acres with a Craig Ellwood bridge-like building that spans the landscape. Most recently, beginning in 2004, Art center added three renovated buildings all near the arroyo seco parkway, now called the South Campus, among them an office building, a former post office, and a renovated supersonic wind tunnel. These new buildings now provide space in which students can build full-scale car models, have dedicated Fine Arts studios, Work in large fabricating shops, and have dedicated areas for Industrial Design and Typography.

Most importantly, Art Center has never strayed from its original brief as a vocational training ground for artistic and design creativity. Students at ArtCenter focus on the technical details of making – whether it is photos, art, industrial product designs, or creatures for motion pictures, animated films, or video games. A recent visit to the campus was like stepping into a hive of creative activity.

In conversation with art journalist Jori Finkel, Sugimoto said that at ArtCenter he was "Well educated here, trained as a very good craftsman." From Ansel Adams who had taught at ArtCenter, Sugimoto read Adams' texts to learn, "almost all of his recipes as [to] craftmanship, printing and the negative." At ArtCenter Sugimoto learned how to make a photograph that was "Perfectly crafted, perfectly printed."

Sugimoto, who was born in Tokyo in 1948, explained that in Japan he had studied Marxist Economics and was very taken with the student protests of the late 1960s, so much so that although he was the eldest son, his parents determined he was not the right person to take over the family pharmaceutical business. Instead, his mother offered to pay his tuition to attend school abroad. He chose ArtCenter, where he began his studies in 1970.

At Finkel's gentle prodding, Sugimoto admitted that during his Art Center days, he was something of "a hippie" — that joints may have been smoked as well as hallucinogens taken. Although Sugimoto was quick to say, he took ArtCenter "seriously." "Thanks to ArtCenter," Sugimoto said, "I was trained as a very, very good craftsman."

After graduating from ArtCenter in 1974, Sugimoto made his way to New York City to find work as a commercial photographer. After a few months he decided that it wasn't for him. He didn't like being told what to do and he didn't want to follow the dictates of an art director. He then saw the work of minimalist artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin and said, "This is my field." Sugimoto decided to join this movement by being a conceptual artist.

Sugimoto explained that he had traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see their collection of works by Marcel Duchamp in particular Étant donnés, which impressed Sugimoto, and in which he recognized as a similar "Twisted Mind" to his own.

While living in New York, to support himself, Sugimoto and his wife opened an antique store where he taught himself to become an expert on Museum quality Asian antiquities, some of which he sold to the Metropolitan Museum among others.

At that time, "Photography was a second-class citizen," Sugimoto said. However, he wondered, "Can I push it up to [to the level of] serious Art? That's my vision." Sugimoto's concept was to make photography that was at the highest levels of craft, but that was also conceptual.

In 1976, Sugimoto began his Diorama series, where he photographed the installations at the Museum of Natural History. Sugimoto imagined them as real, and found a way to photograph the taxidermied animals to seem live.

That same year he also began his Theater series. Sugimoto explained that he had rented a studio in a commercial building in New York for $125 a month, but that the landlord only provided heat during working hours. At night, it could get so freezing cold that he could not sleep, so he would imagine his art.

"I'm always asking myself: What if?" Sugimoto said. "I asked myself: What if I take a picture of an entire movie? And then my vision answered me with this white rectangular screen." The result became his Theater series where the exposure is the length of a film and the light from the screen which appears as white illuminates the theater.

"I'm not the type of photographer," Sugimoto told Finkel, "Who goes out and hangs around to find something to shoot." Instead, Sugimoto shared, "I'm always dreaming and then I have my vision. The next step is to bring my camera out to make my vision happen."

In 1980, Sugimoto began a series of photos of seascapes. Images that look to the horizon. Although they are shot at various locations all over the world, the images have a consistency of size and as to where the horizon bisects the image. They are contemplative works, Rothko-like, in their ability to trigger an emotional state. Similarly, Sugimoto's blurred images of modernist architectural buildings add another dimension to what we often experienced as hard-edged construction.

At one point, Sugimoto who describes himself as "the last analog photographer," who shoots in 8 X 10 format on film and still develops his own images, decided to abandon the camera altogether. In his Lightning Field series, Sugimoto used an electrical generator to make direct exposures to the film surface, producing images that look like phosphorescent organisms.

In his Polarized Color series, Sugimoto used prisms and mirrors to capture those colors in light the eye doesn't see, producing vibrant abstract color fields that seem more painting than photo.

Sugimoto has also challenged himself to create three dimensional artworks, which he calls 'Ready Mades," (another Duchamp reference) rather than sculptures, because as Sugimoto insists, he uses mathematical formulas to dictate the form, saying, "I didn't create the shape so it's a model not a sculpture."

Over the last several decades, Sugimoto has increasingly received commissions to design spaces and buildings. So much so that he has created both a company to make traditional Japanese architecture with modern materials and methods, as well as an architectural firm. Sugimoto, laughing, explained that "I have 17 architects working for me and I'm the only one without a license."

In discussing how he moves between photography, sculpture and architecture, Sugimoto explained that, "I have my own special sense of space." The balance he seeks to achieve in all three in terms of space, as well as light, are the same to Sugimoto.

In all these various disciplines, Sugimoto sees himself as the instrument for imagining or seeing the art, rather than the prime actor. It is the artist, Sugimoto said, "who uncovers beauty in the world – I have to discover it rather than create it." It is Sugimoto's fundamental premise that "Nature is better at design than we are."

Sugimoto received the commission to redesign the gardens of the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D.C. which will open in 2026. Sugimoto also has an ongoing project in Japan, his Enoura Observatory, which Sugimoto imagines as his "last project" because he intends to keep working on it until he no longer can.

Although he is not a practicing Buddhist, Sugimoto said Buddhist concepts, such as Emptiness, often inform his work.

Sugimoto's new exhibition at Lisson Gallery Los Angeles Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form, which opens November 15m 2024 and runs through January 11, 2025, includes images from his Sea of Buddhas series as well as Brush Impressions: Heart Sutra (2023), a majestic wall-sized work where calligraphic characters glow against a black background – created by Sugimoto without a camera in the dark using light and a photochemical reaction. In doing so, Sugimoto has, once again, asked us to see more, to understand that there is more than the naked eye sees, that the past informs the present and the future, and that we can see the intangible.

By asking "What if" Sugimoto has reimagined what a photograph can be – what an artwork can be. It need not even involve a camera; it can even be a building or a garden. Sugimoto is what he dreamed of being: A conceptual artist. As Rolston said about Sugimoto's work when presenting him the ArtCenter Lifetime Achievement award, "They are photographs of ideas. It's the ideas that are beautiful."