Aperture No. 264, Fall 2026: Sugimoto
A time-traveling exploration of light, vision, and photography’s deepest questions, guest edited by Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Inside, readers can also find an interview with the artist entitled "Hiroshi Sugimoto Is Playing the Long Game."
For someone who has made a career of contemplating sight, Hiroshi Sugimoto is skeptical of appearances. “All my life I have made a habit of never believing my eyes,” he once remarked.
Born in Tokyo in 1948, a son in a family of merchants, Sugimoto studied economics before deciding, in 1970, to go west—not to America, but to the Soviet Union, on a backpacking trip inspired by the utopian promises of the socialist experiment. After his travels in Eastern Europe, he moved to Los Angeles, the other end of the ideological spectrum, to study photography at Art Center. His interest in the medium had long been simmering, at least since seeing the revelatory, strange magic of a photogram in an elementary school science class. After college, Sugimoto moved to New York and sold Japanese antiques in SoHo, a business that connected him to the leading Conceptual artists of the 1970s at a time when he grappled with photography’s second-tier status within the art world. The experience deepened his fascination with old objects as markers of time, surfaces of memory and projection, and sources of aesthetic intrigue.
Aperture No. 264, Fall 2026: Sugimoto
A time-traveling exploration of light, vision, and photography’s deepest questions, guest edited by Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Inside, readers can also find an interview with the artist entitled "Hiroshi Sugimoto Is Playing the Long Game."
For someone who has made a career of contemplating sight, Hiroshi Sugimoto is skeptical of appearances. “All my life I have made a habit of never believing my eyes,” he once remarked.
Born in Tokyo in 1948, a son in a family of merchants, Sugimoto studied economics before deciding, in 1970, to go west—not to America, but to the Soviet Union, on a backpacking trip inspired by the utopian promises of the socialist experiment. After his travels in Eastern Europe, he moved to Los Angeles, the other end of the ideological spectrum, to study photography at Art Center. His interest in the medium had long been simmering, at least since seeing the revelatory, strange magic of a photogram in an elementary school science class. After college, Sugimoto moved to New York and sold Japanese antiques in SoHo, a business that connected him to the leading Conceptual artists of the 1970s at a time when he grappled with photography’s second-tier status within the art world. The experience deepened his fascination with old objects as markers of time, surfaces of memory and projection, and sources of aesthetic intrigue.
