Through meticulously balanced images that encourage prolonged attention, Sugimoto’s work focuses audience consideration on the ways in which humanity makes sense of itself. Sugimoto moved to Los Angeles in 1971, receiving his BFA from the Art Center College of Design in 1972. In 1974, he moved to New York, and became involved in the Minimal and Conceptual art scenes of the late 1970s. His best-known series, including Dioramas, Theaters, Seascapes, Portraits, Architecture, Conceptual Forms, and Lightning Fields draw heavily upon repetition, unifying disparate locations through shared compositions, and are characterized by use of long exposures, black and white film, and analog processes. In recent years, Sugimoto has begun to design architectural spaces that, like his photographs, use simplicity of form to focus attention on the mechanisms through which we understand the world. Sugimoto has had solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Osaka (1989), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1994), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2000), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2008), among many other venues. He has received many honors, including the Praemium Imperiale Award for Painting, Tokyo in 2009 and Officier de L’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in Paris in 2013. In 2017, he was honored as a Person of Cultural Merit in Tokyo. His photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Gallery, London; and many others.

Founded in 1926 by Christian Zervos at 14, rue du Dragon in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Cahiers d’Art encompasses a publishing house, a gallery, and a revue. The Cahiers d’Art Revue was entirely unique when it was introduced, and it still is: a revue of contemporary art defined by its combination of striking typography and layout, abundant photography, and juxtaposition of ancient and modern art. Between the 1920s and the mid-1970s, Cahiers d’Art published ninety-seven issues of the Revue and more than fifty books on fine art and architecture, as well as the thirty-three volume catalogue raisonné of Pablo Picasso. After its acquisition and relaunch in 2012 by Staffan Ahrenberg, an editorial board comprised of Sam Keller, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Isabela Mora, and Staffan Ahrenberg was created. Cahiers d’Art has since published several new Revues and art books devoted to Ellsworth Kelly, Rosemarie Trockel, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, Thomas Schütte, Gabriel Orozco, Joan Miró, Lucas Arruda, Ai Weiwei, Arthur Jafa, Frank Gehry, Christo, and others. From the 1920s till today, Cahiers d’Art has maintained a gallery, exhibiting the artists it publishes. Cahiers d’Art continues to fulfill its mission to be the cultural bridge between the avant-garde of Picasso, Duchamp, and Le Corbusier, and the leading artists and architects of our time.