Hiroshi Sugimoto, a conceptual artist, was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1948 and lives and works in New York and Tokyo. He started his work in 1976, the central idea of Sugimoto’s work is that photography is a time machine, a method of preserving and picturing memory and time. He uses his camera in a way to create images that seem to convey his subjects essence, whether architectural, sculptural, painterly, or of the natural world. Sugimoto is also deeply influenced by the writings and works of the conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, as well as the Dadaist and Surrealist movements as a whole.

Lightning Fields is an exhibition of new photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto on view at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, U.s.a.  from September 10 to October 31, 2009.  Each image is a unique document of an electrical current. Hiroshi Sugimoto uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto his film.

Photos by Hiroshi Sugimoto | Lightning Field: 199,128 and 144