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This catalog was published to accompany the exhibition “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine” (on view at the Hayward Gallery in London and the UCCA in Beijing between October 2023 and June 2024).

Curated by Ralph Rugoff, the exhibition and catalog bring together works made by the exceptional Japanese photographer over the course of the past fifty years, from his earliest Dioramas series made in 1974 to his most recent Opticks work. The 340 works featured in the book are organized into eight chronological chapters, each preceded by an in-depth explanatory essay written by renowned writers, artists and curators (including Geoffrey Batchen, Mami Kataoka, Ralph Rugoff, David Chipperfield, Lara Strongman, and Allie Biswas). With its wide selection of works, the large format and high quality of the prints, and the invaluable knowledge presented in the essays and additional texts (a chronology, bibliography, etc.), “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine” offers the most comprehensive overview of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work and is an ideal introduction to the artist’s oeuvre.

“Since the beginning of his career, Sugimoto has brought a shrewd conceptual edge to traditional genres such as still life, landscape, portraiture and abstraction, creating pictures that unsettle facile interpretations. Playing on the contradictory character of photography as a medium suited to both documentation and invention, he has created some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time – pictures that are meticulously nuanced and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalisingly ambiguous.”
― from Ralph Rugoff’s foreword