Saturday, November 22, 2014

Paul Ruehrmund Weekly Post




Boden Sea, 1993
Cover on U2 "No Line On the Horizon's" Album, 2009

North Atlantic Ocean, Cliffs of Moher, 1989

Sea of Japan, Hokkaido, 1986




Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Japan and obtained his BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena , California.  He currently resides in New York City and Tokyo.  He views his "work as an expression of 'time exposed', or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time.  His work also focuses on the transience of life, and the conflict between life and death." quoted from Wikipedia.  While he has photographed  movie and opera houses, natural history dioramas and wax figures and is a practicing architect, I chose to feature his work Seascapes which he began in 1980 and continues today.  The three works above are on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  Sugimoto uses a large format 8x10 camera and extremely long exposures.  His pictures are done in black and white.

From the Metropolitan Museum website: "The horizon is central to Sugimoto's work; it describes the contact between Earth's surface and the ether and is also a metaphor for the bounds of our mental and visual perception. Viewed in a group, the photographs align along the horizon, suggesting the continuity of its compass while revealing endless variations. Rippling tides, luminous haze, shredding mists, windswept air—these aspects in the shifting envelopes of air and water covering the earth have the featureless purity of the world's first day. The depth of field within each picture is as far as the eye can see. This visual approximation of the infinite is an apt expression of the sublime for an age that has forgotten that such majesty exists on a shrinking and polluted planet."


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