by Maria Anna Tappeiner, Germany 2007, 43'
| PHOTOGRAPHY: Norbert Kinzel, Tom Kaiser | PRODUCER: Ulrike Gulden-Sanders | |
| SOUND: Dieter Thoma | COMMISSIONING EDITOR: Reinhard Wulf (WDR/3SAT) | |
| EDITING: Brigitte Warken-Könings | ||
| SHOOTING FORMAT: betacam sp | PRODUCTION: Westdeutscher Rundfunk WDR |
Presented at The Screen of the Arts 2008In an on-going research on techniques and aesthetics of traditional photography, Hiroshi Sugimoto shows us the still resistant modernity of a language and of a professionalism that are likely to disappear in the era of digital revolution. Born in a Tokyo still occupied by the American army, he moved to the States at the end of the 70’s. Here the photographer has gradually developped a style that joins Western shapes and contents to his originary cultural sensibility, always shifting from Japan to Los Angeles and New York, where today he is based.
The obsessive care of every detail and the relationship with painting and theater are just some of the elements of Sugimoto’s art, which exalts the paradoxical condition of photography, still divided between its documentary and aesthetic values. As he says, photography is art and thus it is not interested in just representing reality: “abstraction is better”.
Maria Anna Tappeiner
Born in 1968, is a freelance art historian and filmmaker living in Düsseldorf, Germany. For the German television she has produced documentaries, including portraits of contemporary artists and film-makers, where her unmistakable style emerges through the careful descriptions of the characters and the keen study of the proposed artworks.
Selected Filmography
1999 William Kentridge 2001 Gary Hill 2002 Matthew Barney 2004 Sophie Calle 2005 Richard Serra
www.wdr.de