Sugimoto Portraits

A Guggenheim Museum Publication

Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto is renowned for his elegant photographic series of seascapes, theaters, museum dioramas, and Buddhist statuary. His new series presents life-size, black-and-white portraits of historical figures-Henry VIII and each of his wives, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde, and Emperor Hirohito, among others-photographed in wax museums, isolated against black backgrounds, and dramatically lit so as to create haunting Rembrandtesque images. The series, which also includes a 25-foot, five-panel photograph of a wax effigy of Leonardo's Last Supper, emulates the grand tradition of portraiture and recalls the wax figures' sources in famous paintings by Holbein, David, van Dyck, and Vermeer.

This book, published to accompany an exhibition of commissioned work for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin that also travels to the Guggenheim Museo Bilbao, includes texts by a team of art historians and an interview with Sugimoto, offering fresh insights into the work of this contemporary artist.

Tracey Bashkoff is assistant curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Nancy Spector is curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

75 duotone photographs, 11 x 12"

Hedgecoe and Snowdon depict a man with his hands rather than face, but Sugimoto's portraits are far more radical. Their difference seems immediately obvious. Many of their subjects are dressed in clothing from much earlier periods and resemble famous painted portraits of historical figures. Others are contemporaries--Arafat, Castro, the pope--but look too familiar and perfect, standing in characteristic attitudes but before a black backdrop, not in the milieus in which they would look natural. Are they actors? No, they're wax figures. Sugimoto is much more conceptually rigorous than Snowdon or even an antic like David LaChapelle (Hotel LaChapelle, 1999) and lacks archness. He is concerned with aesthetic questions, such as what representation is and has been historically. The commentators in this book, who include, in an interview, Sugimoto, explain it all, as well as earlier projects by the elegant and cerebral Japanese photographer. Ray Olson
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