Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. After graduating from Saint Paul's University, Tokyo, Sugimoto went to Los Angeles to study photography at the Art Center College of Design. In 1974, he moved to New York City and began his practice as an artist.

During the time that Sugimoto was an antiques dealer, he became familiar with ancient items from Japan in particular and, in the process, he amassed a sizable collection of objects that encapsulated a sort of timelessness.  These included fossils predating human civilization, archaeological documentation about Japan's Old Stone Age and Jomon Periods, Buddhist art and statues, old calligraphy works, paintings, and meteorites. This assembly would eventually serve as the underpinning of his own world of creations and provide the main themes of his work on the layers of history in human memories and the visualization of time.

Sugimoto's clear concepts and sophisticated techniques were met with a strong reception and his photographs were acquired by numerous art museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate Modern, National Gallery in London, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. His main bodies of work are Dioramas(1976-), Theaters(1976-), Seascapes(1980-), Architecture(1997-), Portraits(1999-), Conceptual Forms(2004-), and Lighting Fields(2008-).

In recent years, Sugimoto has also expanded his choice of medium to include writing and architecture. The books Koke no musumade and Ututu na zou (both published by Shinchosha) are compilations of his essays and in 2008 he opened his own architectural firm, New Material Research Laboratory. Sugimoto has been active in rethinking the traditional arts. In 2001, he produced and directed the Noh performance "Noh such thing as Time" at Dia Center, New York, and established the Odawara Art Foundation in 2011 to assist the reconsideration of history through the producing and promoting of classical theater arts. In 2013, he held the “SANBASO, divine dance” performance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In the same year, he completed a European tour of “Sugimoto Bunraku”, taking part in producing, art direction, and stage design.

Sugimoto was awarded the Mainichi Art Prize in 1988, Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2001, Praemium Imperiale, Painting award from the Japan Arts Association in 2009, Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2010 by Japanese Government, and Order des Arts et des  Letters in 2013 by the French Government.