Hiroshi Sugimoto

 Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer. His works mainly consist of high detail black and white images, featuring heavy contrast and lots of negative space. Sugimoto also uses quite a bit of long exposure, ranging anywhere from minutes, to even a few hours to capture a single shot. 

This first image is of the U.A Playhouse in Great Neck New York, taken in 1978. For this image Sugimoto enters a cinema that is playing a film. He captures every single minute of the film on his camera, not as a video, but as a single image with a very long exposure. That is why the screen is totally white, as it is where the camera captures the most light from the image as the screenplay commences on. The process doesn't seem to capture any audience members, meaning either they moved around at some point or just weren't in the camera's line of vision.

This next image is from a series titled Lightning Fields. I suspect this image was done using long exposure of some kind, creating pure darkness and using the flash of the lightning to capture the form instantly. The negative space in the image and lack of a backdrop really adds to the sense of greatness of the lightning itself. I assume a very long shutter speed was used, as well as a very strong filter, even if the image was taken at night time. 

This self portrait image of Sugimoto embodies himself as a part of his work. I struggle to imagine how this image would have been captured without post editing. The reflectiveness of his glasses frames stand out, making it almost a staple of his identity. I almost want to say something like a light was shone on his glasses, but not only would the reflection be different, but his face would be lit up too. Was it a post editing process? Or something to do with filters? Perhaps it was done with a flash that reflected off the glasses.