Originally, I focused on technology and design, but what prompted me to seriously delve into covering contemporary art was the "Hiroshi Sugimoto: The End of Time" exhibition held at the Mori Art Museum in 2005.

AI, which is currently attracting a lot of attention, is a prime example of the rapidly changing world of technology. A technology that we hear about for the first time this year may give rise to a giant company that influences the world in just two or three years, while many others disappear without anyone noticing. New things appear one after another, and things from just a short time ago are consumed at a furious pace and relegated to the status of worthless. In such a trend, it is difficult for the spirit to take root to create something that will endure through the ages, and people tend to become ephemeral.

The 2005 exhibition I saw while harboring such thoughts was a shock. Despite using photography, a medium that is easier to reproduce and tends to have a weaker presence compared to paintings, each piece exuded a powerful aura that drew the viewer in.

One reason for this, I believe, is that Sugimoto deconstructs the essence of photography as a form of expression and uses it as a device to depict more universal elements such as "time" and "light."

However, even without deciphering such complex concepts in the explanatory text, I believe that the reason it attracts so many people is, first and foremost, because each and every piece is overwhelmingly beautiful.

The ethereal horizon and the overwhelming presence emanating from the gaze of the lifeless wax figures—such charms are not easily created. They are born only after meticulous planning and refinement through countless trials and errors.

Another appealing aspect of Sugimoto's work is that, while it possesses a Western beauty and sophistication, it is rooted in a Japanese aesthetic sensibility that resonates with the concept of "mono no aware" (the pathos of things), which he subtly reveals through the skillful use of explanatory texts and exhibition displays, in true modern-day fashion sense.

In recent years, Sugimoto has worked on a wide range of projects, not limited to photography, but encompassing architecture, Noh theater, antique art, and the tea ceremony. I myself have followed his work from time to time, from the Enoura Observatory, which he considers his final work, to exhibitions in Versailles and New York, stage productions, and antique art exhibitions that he has curated.

A large-scale retrospective of Hiroshi Sugimoto's work, primarily focusing on his photographs, is currently being held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. "Hiroshi Sugimoto: Extinct Photography"—this is the first solo exhibition of his work primarily consisting of photographs at a museum in Japan in 21 years, since "Hiroshi Sugimoto: The End of Time" at the Mori Art Museum (2005).

"Extinction" is a rather unsettling word. However, when it comes to expressing the nostalgia, transience, and beauty of things that are coming to an end—a feeling that somehow captivates many people—few people surpass Hiroshi Sugimoto. So, when Sugimoto takes "extinction" itself as his theme, expectations can only rise.

The funeral of silver halide photography, and of human civilization.

"I think retrospective exhibitions are usually held after an artist dies, but in my case, I felt like it was almost time to end my career, so the government decided to let me have one," Sugimoto said self-deprecatingly at a briefing session leading up to the opening, drawing laughter from the attendees.

The title "Extinct Photographs" has a double meaning: on a media level, it refers to the end of silver halide photography, and on a larger level, it refers to the extinction of human civilization.

"The materials used for silver halide photography are disappearing rapidly, so we don't know when film itself will disappear."

Digital photography has emerged as a replacement for silver halide photography, but Sugimoto harshly criticizes the increasing number of digital images, including those created by AI, calling them "illustrators of inner landscapes."

"If a cyber-bomb (that destroys only digital technology) were dropped, all of our current digital infrastructure would disappear. Records would vanish, we would lose control of our water and electricity, and humanity would revert to the Stone Age. In that case, all digital memories of the 21st century would be lost."

What this exhibition is attempting is a large-scale "funeral" for the medium of "silver halide photography," which is effectively coming to an end with the rise of digital technology, and perhaps also for humanity, which is on the brink of extinction due to its dependence on the unreliable and ephemeral existence of digital technology, with Sugimoto himself serving as the chief mourner.

An exhibition looking back on a half-century career.

The exhibition will provide an overview of Hiroshi Sugimoto's half-century career, from his early works to the present, through 13 series of works, including approximately 60 silver halide photographs and several three-dimensional pieces.

The exhibition is structured in three chapters, mostly in chronological order. The first chapter begins with the early trilogy, including the "Diorama" series, which, half a century after its conception, can finally be exhibited in its entirety, tracing the beginnings of human consciousness. The second chapter features works themed on the "forms of ideas" that this consciousness built. The final chapter concludes with a series of works that fix light itself, leading to the latest work, "CAMERA MAN," which attempts to condense a lifetime's worth of light into a single image. This three-chapter structure was put together by Rei Masuda, the chief researcher at the museum who was in charge of this exhibition.

The most impressive part is undoubtedly the exhibition room displaying his masterpiece, the "Seascape" series. Seven works, all aligned with the horizon, are arranged in a gently curving room. This composition, dividing the space into sky and sea, is the result of his search for the same scenery that ancient humans must have seen. Sitting on the bench facing the works and gazing at them for a while, the hustle and bustle of the museum fades away, and you feel a sense of bliss as your consciousness is drawn into the horizon beyond time and space.

As with his other exhibitions, Sugimoto himself skillfully utilizes rooms of different shapes to create the exhibition itself, checking everything from the arrangement of sections to every single light fixture, resulting in a flawless and beautiful finish.

The "Portraits" series, featuring photographs of wax figures, is displayed in a deep room. On the far wall hangs a portrait of Princess Diana. As if guided by her gaze, one follows the portraits one after another, moving further into the room.

Below, we will introduce the works displayed in each chapter in more detail.

A story from humanity's first memories to the conceptualization of society.

Chapter 1, "Time, Light, and Memory," explores the beginnings of human consciousness and the passage of time through the early trilogy "Diorama," "Theater," and "Seascape," published from the mid-1970s to the 80s.

The first works on display are his debut "Diorama" series, but in fact, this exhibition marks the completion of this series. In 1974, Sugimoto moved to the United States and photographed a stuffed polar bear he saw at the American Museum of Natural History with a large-format camera, striking at the "illusion and reality of photography" where inanimate objects appear to be alive. The series expanded beyond stuffed animals to recreate the history of humankind, tracing the evolution from apes to humans. In his youth, Sugimoto was influenced by Marxism, Engels' "The Role of Labor in the Development of Apes into Humans," and Darwin's "On the Origin of Species." He sought to visualize, through dioramas, the materialistic view of history that labor and the development of tools nurtured the human brain and created society.

However, there were two exhibits for which permission to photograph had not been granted for many years. These were dioramas depicting the era when humans were preyed upon (eaten by other animals) and the Neolithic period, such as a scene of "an early man being eaten by a hyena." It was said that these had been kept secret due to considerations of human rights awareness and racial discrimination in the 1970s. Sugimoto negotiated with the current director, saying, "I will not donate my collection unless you add these and complete the series," and he was granted permission to photograph them.

The subsequent "Theater" series was born from an experiment to photograph a completely dark theater using the light equivalent of an entire film. In 1970s New York movie theaters, the photographer experimented with leaving the shutters open while a film was playing. What emerged was a screen shining in the darkness, where the accumulation of time in the film was reduced to pure white light, and the interior decorations and seats of the theater were outlined by that light. It is a renowned series that captures the invisible passage of time as a tangible trace.

"Seascape," the final work in his initial trilogy, is an attempt to trace back to the beginnings of human consciousness. Why the beginnings of consciousness? Sugimoto reasoned that if there is a landscape that ancient people and we modern people can see in exactly the same way, it is none other than the sea. Just the sky, the sea, and the horizon. This single image, devoid of islands or ships, is a device that connects human consciousness across time. He searched the seas of the world, and the first one was photographed in 1980 in Jamaica in the Caribbean. He searched for cliffs without obstacles on a map, calculated the direction of sunrise and moonrise, the season, and even the wind direction, and then stood on the site. There is also a work in which he waited for three days for rain to occur, and captured the decisive moment when water vapor turned into rain.

The origin of this theme lies in Sugimoto's own earliest memories. When he was five years old, he looked out the window of the Shonan train on his way back to Tokyo from Atami. Between tunnels, the sea would appear and disappear in flashes. That stop-motion-like scene was where his consciousness first blossomed. That is why "seascapes" are not only a part of humanity's memory, but also the origin of Sugimoto's own memories.

In "Seascape," Sugimoto explored the origins of consciousness. In Chapter 2, "Forms of Ideas," he examines how that consciousness has constructed the complex societies and concepts of modern times. "Architecture," which uses architecture as a motif; "Stylized Sculpture," which traces the evolution of fashion; and "Forms of Ideas," sculptures that give three dimensions to mathematical formulas—all of these are reflections on the "forms of things" created by human intelligence and imagination.

In "Architecture," Sugimoto deliberately blurs the focus when photographing masterpieces of modernist architecture, bringing to light the architecture as an ideal in the minds of the architects. According to Sugimoto, modern architecture is merely the result of the popularity of concrete, a pseudo-stone, creating gigantic "anthills" called cities. In "Stylized Sculpture," he explores the process by which clothing, originally intended to protect the body, became more decorative over time and evolved into artificial forms. And in "Forms of Ideas," he uses mathematical models that visualize phenomena within the human brain to show the point where art and science intersect. All of these works trace the trajectory of humanity's departure from nature and its reconstruction of the world through its own ideas, and at the same time implicitly suggest that this rationalism will eventually reach its limits and lead to extinction.

"Extinction Photographs" - What was human civilization all about?

Chapter 3 is titled "Extinct Photographs," which is also the title of the exhibition itself. This space most directly expresses the themes of the end of silver halide photography and the extinction of human civilization. It features a collection of works that question the origins and limitations of photography as a medium.

This third chapter begins with the "Fossil (Previous Photograph, Time Recording Device)" series, which features photographs of fossils. Sugimoto points out that "fossils and photographs have the same function. Both can preserve time." Just as trilobites from hundreds of millions of years ago were trapped in rock, photographs also capture past time on film. Now that silver halide photography is on the verge of extinction, the photographs Sugimoto has taken are themselves becoming "fossils" to be unearthed from future geological strata.

Next to it is a photograph that captures the very beginning of photography. "Photogenic Drawing" is a work in which Sugimoto confronts early negatives left behind by William Henry Fox Talbot, the father of 19th-century photography. Talbot discovered that by placing an object on photosensitive paper and shining light on it, without using a camera, he could obtain a black and white inverted negative. This became the prototype for later silver halide photography. In this series, Sugimoto inverts the light and dark of Talbot's negatives, reviving the ghost of this forgotten technique.

The "Portraits" series stands out in Chapter 3. These are photographs of wax figures from places like Madame Tussauds in London, and historical figures, including Princess Diana mentioned at the beginning, look back at the viewer with a presence as if they were portraits painted while they were still alive. Inanimate objects take on a vivid sense of reality the moment they are captured in a photograph—the "illusion and reality of photography" theme explored in his debut work "Diorama" is repeated with the most eloquent subject: the human face.

"Discharge Field" is a series of works created without even a camera. In a darkroom, static electricity sparks often run through the film, damaging the image. Sugimoto has turned this nuisance into a work of art. He artificially releases high-voltage electricity, directly imprinting the flash onto the film. Without a lens or subject, the light itself branches out, carving patterns resembling trees, blood vessels, or lightning. This series discards even the premise that photography "captures something," and instead displays only the traces of the direct encounter between light and silver halide.

The next two works confront "light" itself. In the 17th century, Isaac Newton demonstrated how to separate sunlight into seven colors through a prism. Sugimoto recreates that experiment and captures the spectrally separated color bands on a Polaroid camera. "Opticks" captures pure colors, painted solely by light itself, without the use of any paint.

On the other hand, in "In Praise of Shadows," which borrows its title from an essay by Junichiro Tanizaki, a single image captures the entire process of a candle being lit in darkness, flickering, and eventually burning out. The life cycle of light, that of a flame, never takes the same form for even a moment. Just as Tanizaki saw the beauty of Japan in the shadows that existed before electric lights, Sugimoto also captures the gradations of light that only emerge in the presence of darkness.

Chapter 3 then continues with an exhibition featuring a piece selected by Sugimoto from his collection of antique art, evoking the moment of extinction, accompanied by his own optical glass five-tiered pagoda, as if offering a prayer.

And the final piece in Chapter 3 is a sculpture of a mysterious glasses-shaped device called "CAMERA MAN." Created in collaboration with eyewear brand JINS and camera manufacturer SIGMA, this device has a shutter on the lens. When you put it on and press the button, the shutter remains closed for three minutes, leaving you in darkness. After three minutes, the shutter opens for just one second, imprinting the scenery before your eyes. If this one-second shutter opening time is considered equivalent to a human lifespan (approximately 85 years), then the 15,000-year history of human civilization is said to be equivalent to about three minutes.

In other words, the wearer is allowed to see the world only in the final moment after traversing the long darkness that existed before the dawn of civilization. The 15,000 years that humanity has built up, and even a single lifetime, are but a blink of an eye, a mere second, in the grand scheme of cosmic time—a single device worn on the face allows the wearer to experience this immense scale. Photography is a device that fixes light and time. Sugimoto, who has spent half a century deconstructing this principle, has arrived at the ultimate conclusion: to fold the camera into the human body itself.

Laughing at the end of an era with satirical poetry

Based on what's been said so far, this exhibition might seem like a heavy, apocalyptic one. However, this is where Sugimoto's true genius lies. He wraps this extremely serious theme of extinction in the humor of "kyoka" (comic poems) scattered throughout the entire exhibition space.

Following the tradition of "poetry and painting scrolls" that dates back to the Muromachi period, each weighty photograph is accompanied by a candid, lighthearted commentary or a verse that offers a cynical view of the world. For example, Sugimoto declares that his artistic activities are "all about leisure. How to kill time is the essence of life." He considers all time other than that spent earning a living to be "leisure," and that religion, philosophy, and scholarship are all grand ways to pass the time. He also considers the path of art to be a happy way to pass the time in self-absorption, and he playfully caricatures himself, saying, "I was born here, bloomed wildly, and have now reached the point where I can express my feelings. I am a kyōka poet called 'Suttonkyō'."

Serious works are waka, and frivolous works are kyōka—that's what he says, but his works are highly interwoven with allusions to poems from the Kokin Wakashū and parodies of early modern literature, offering a deeper enjoyment to those who understand them. However, Sugimoto doesn't intend to make this a privilege for only a select few, and when asked about the historical and literary context, he laughs and says, "If you don't understand it, you can usually just ask an AI."

Sugimoto's style: The aesthetics of decay

Although his works are lighthearted and humorous, each piece by Sugimoto is the result of meticulous calculations and extensive research and experimentation. At the satellite venue of this exhibition, Sugimoto's notebooks, "Sugimoto Notebooks," which he used to create his works, are also on display. These are not to be missed.

What does it mean to "end on a high note"? Seeing the exhibition made me think about this again, and in the process, I remembered the Odawara Cultural Foundation's "Enoura Observatory," an architectural work to which Sugimoto had poured his passion for many years and which he sometimes referred to as his final work.

Sugimoto has long stated that he conceived this architectural complex with the idea of ​​"how beautifully it would remain as a ruin when excavated 5000 years after the collapse of civilization." This perspective, which works backward from the idea of ​​how beautifully his own works will perish, much like gazing upon the pyramids of Egypt or the Parthenon of Greece, is connected to the Japanese "aesthetics of decay" that began with the Tale of the Heike.

And this exhibition, too, marks the end of a grand comedy: the modern age where everything is digitized and memories are bleached away as data. Without grief or resistance, he composes satirical poems and laughs, creating the most beautiful possible ending for things that are fading away. He transforms the end into a celebration. That is the way Hiroshi Sugimoto, the chief mourner, does things. And the fact that we find this ending beautiful is nothing less than the aesthetic sensibility that we Japanese have long cultivated.

◆Hiroshi Sugimoto's Extinct Photographs

Date: June 16th (Tuesday) – September 13th (Sunday), 2026
Venue: The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1F Special Exhibition Gallery (3-1 Kitanomaru Park, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo)
Opening hours: 10:00 AM to 17:00 PM (until 20:00 PM on Fridays and Saturdays; last entry 30 minutes before closing).
Closed on: Mondays (open on July 20th), July 21st