Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo, relocating to the United States in 1972. He studied Fine Art at the Art Centre College of Design in Los Angeles from 1972-74, where he trained in various techniques of photography. Throughout his career, Sugimoto has tended to work in series, experimenting ways in which to explore time, often with the sustained study of a singular motif. Sugimoto has continued to develop ongoing series, including photographs of theatres, wax portraits and Buddhist Sculptures, which blur distinctions between the real and the imaginary. He mostly works with black and white images, using a large format camera, long exposures and gelatin silver prints.

Sugimoto’s Lightning Fields series was influenced in part by a desire to re-create major scientific discoveries in the darkroom, most specifically W.H. Fox Talbot’s research into static electricity. The series features camera-less photographs depicting electrical charges, made using a Van de Graaff generator to charge a metal ball with static. The negative pole was provided by a large metal tabletop on which was placed a sheet of film. The ‘lightning field’ is formed by the spark resulting from Sugimoto moving the metal ball close to the metal tabletop once the electric charge reaches its desired strength. If the charge is powerful enough it creates the capillary effect of electric light so dramatically captured in Lightning Fields 225. The print is an enlargement from a selected portion of the negative.

Works by Sugimoto reside in major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the V&A Collection, London. Sugimoto’s importance as a fine art photographer has been recognised by numerous prestigious awards, such as the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2001) and most recently The RPS Centenary Medal (2017). He has exhibited extensively in venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.