Speech

这是一篇关于 摄影大师Hiroshi Sugimoto的演讲稿，首先介绍了他的生平，其次是他的著作与特点，接着介绍其思想框架

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen!

Today, my topic is an artist whose name is hiroshi sugimoto.
Firstly, I would give u a short introduction about him.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Japan in 1948.  Sugimoto initially studied politics and sociology at St. Paul’s University in Tokyo, but in 1970 he enrolled at the Art Center College of Art and Design in Los Angeles to study Fine Art.

He subsequently moved to New York, where he established himself as a photographer interested in the representation of reality. His catalogue is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes. Because Sugimoto was influenced by Dada and Surrealist techniques and aesthetics, he photographed movie and opera houses, natural history dioramas, and wax figures, using long exposures to create eerie scenes with unnatural lighting. His work deals with history and temporal existence by investigating themes of time, empiricism, and metaphysics.

Sugimoto is also a practicing architect and has designed specific spaces to exhibit his photography. His interest in architecture is also evident in his many photographs of old buildings. His work is highly respected and has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, among other institutions.

Sugimoto has received a number of grants and fellowships, and his work is held in the collections of the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of New York, among many others. Portraits, initially created for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, traveled to the Guggenheim New York in March 2001. Sugimoto received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2001. In 2006, a mid career retrospective was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. A monograph entitled Hiroshi Sugimoto was produced in conjunction with the exhibition. He received the Photo España prize, also in 2006, and in 2009 was the recipient of the Paemium Imperiale, Painting Award from the Japan Arts Association.  Most recently, Sugimoto unveiled his “Glass Tea House Mondrian” at Le Stanze del Vetro on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore during the 2014 Venice Biennale.

Now, let’s go to the special features about him and his artwork.
He is known for his explorations of the illusionary properties of photography. In particular, he brings together three series—habitat dioramas, wax portraits, and early photographic negatives—that present objects of historical and cultural significance from various museum collections. By photographing subjects that  replicate moments from the distant past, Sugimoto critiques the medium's presumed capacity to portray history with accuracy.

Now, I will introduce something about the Framework of his mind.
In terms of the different mind of his artwork, it can be divided into three parts---- habitat dioramas, wax portraits, and early photographic negatives habitat dioramas, wax portraits, and early photographic negatives.
In terms of dioramas, his works omit the didactic materials surrounding each display and heighten the illusion that the animals were photographed in their natural habitats. While each photograph appears to be a candid moment captured by an experienced nature photographer, the subjects depicted will hold their poses indefinitely.

In terms of wax portraits , Posed against pitch-black backdrops and framed by the camera in a manner alluding to old master portrait-painting traditions, Sugimoto's subjects were captured with a nine-minute exposure that illuminates the finely modeled expressions and the sumptuous costumes. These life-sized photographs record likenesses that have been filtered through multiple reproductions of the original sitter.

In terms of early photographic negatives,  After photographing some of Talbot's photogenic-drawing negatives, he produced large-scale prints and colored them with toning agents to replicate the hues of the paper negatives. The scale of the enlarged prints reveals the fibers of the original paper, which create intricate patterns embedded in the images.

As a famous artists, what is the review from others ?“Sugimoto is one of our era's most respected photographers. His photographic subjects are important to the interpretation of art, history, science and religion. He combines Eastern philosophy and Western culture closely. " he was commented as the winners for the year 2001.
Also, he received many grants and fellowships. for example,(read ppt)

Now, I  will give an example of him to show the most important part.

In this instance he used a camera obscura to project the light that was reflected off the building through a lens fitted onto the camera obscura. A piece of light-sensitive paper was taped at the back of the camera obscura. The reflection of the building was registered on the paper, which produced this sketchy negative image of the building. Talbot conducted these light-sensitivity experiments from mid-1834 until the summer of 1835. In early January 1839, he learned about Jacques Louis Mandé Daguerre's impending announcement of his daguerreotype process in France; two weeks after Daguerre's announcement, Talbot published his invention of the photogenic drawing.