PORTFOLIO / PRINTS

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  • Artist:

    Hiroshi Sugimoto

  • Title:

    Pre-Photography Time-Recording Devices

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“Compared to painting and to sculpture, photography is a newcomer as an art medium. Even before the invention of photography in the early nineteenth century, there already existed a wonderful medium capable of recording the past with great precision. This pre-photography time-recording device was the fossil. If we allow the technology of the fossil to be an art, then fossils can be characterized justifiably as the world’s oldest art form. Indeed, fossils have been around for aeons and long predate the human race and its ability to appreciate art.” ----- Hiroshi Sugimoto

The platinum print series PPTRD is created between Sugimoto's collection and photographic artwork. There is a period of time when Sugimoto was an antique art dealer, which left him an enormous collection of fossils, archaeological evidence, buddhist artwork, antique calligraphic works and paintings, and even meteorites, that relates to his world of art creations.

“If strata are ‘negatives’ of past life, fossils are their ‘positive’ images... Taking a photograph, I realized, is to fossilize the present day.”
 ----- Hiroshi Sugimoto