Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work is more than photography

"Bay of Sagami, Enoura" is part of a series of photos by Hiroshi Sugimoto taken from the Enoura Observatory in Kanagawa Prefecture, which serves as the home for the series. | © HIROSHI SUGIMOTO / COURTESY OF GALLERY KOYANAGI

Sep 17, 2026

Hiroshi Sugimoto is often introduced as a photographer, but that title has long been insufficient to capture the sweep of his creative activities. Over the past five decades, Sugimoto, 78, has worked as architect, sculptor, designer, landscape creator, tea practitioner, museum founder, art dealer and entrepreneur. Each of these practices informs the others. Photography is only one medium within a much larger philosophical project.

“Dioramas,” full-scale silver gelatin prints representing the museum installations that first introduced Sugimoto to the world in the 1970s, show dioramas come alive, producing something like a miracle of resurrection.

More ambitious still is the “Portraits” series, in which the stuffed predators of the “Dioramas” are replaced by wax figures from Madame Tussauds. Here the theme of resurrection assumes almost biblical proportions: To bring human beings back from the dead is, after all, the subject of the Last Judgment.

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