People have been reading photography as a true document, at the same time thay are now getting suspicious. I am basically an honest person, so I let the camera capture whatever it captures...whether you believe it or not is up to you; it’s not my responsibility, blame my camera, not me.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
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If I already have a vision, my work is almost done. The rest is a technical problem.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
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When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan—at least in Japanese. The word shashin , for photograph, combines the characters sha , meaning to reflect or copy, and shin , meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
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I live in the shadow... I like shadow, that’s why I became a black and white photographer.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
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I’m inviting the spirits into my photography. It’s an act of God.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
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Fossils work almost the same way as photography... as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
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My method is different from the one most photographers use. I do not go around and shoot. I usually have a specific vision, just by myself. One night I thought of taking a photographic exposure of a film at a movie theater while the film was being projected. I imagined how it could be possible to shoot an entire movie with my camera. Then I had the clear vision that the movie screen would show up on the picture as a white rectangle. I thought it could look like a very brilliant white rectangle coming out from the screen, shining throughout the whole theater. It might seem very interesting and mysterious, even in some way religious.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
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Before the invention of movies was the invention of photography. To make a movie, you have to sew single-shot photographic images together to make it look like a movie. It is all an illusion to the human eye.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
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I didn’t want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art—I still see this.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
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