I think I heard about Hiroshi Sugimoto for the first time when I was in Naoshima. What caught my attention the most about him were his photographs of horizons. In them, the sky and the sea unite in harmony in the horizon in one line of space.
Bono liked this photo of Sugimoto so much that U2 used it for the front cover of their album “No Line on the Horizon”:
Sugimoto was quite demanding and he let them use his work of art but they were not even able to write U2 on it, they had to respect the original photo as it was.
One day she’s still, the next she swells
You can hear the universe in her sea shells
Oh yeah
Oh oh oh oh oh oh ohNo, no line on the horizon, no line
I know a girl with a hole in her heart
She said infinity is a great place to start
Oh oh oh oh oh oh ohShe said “Time is irrelevant, it’s not linear”
Then she put her tongue in my ear
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh
No, no line on the horizon
No, no lineNo, no line on the horizon
No, no line
In September I went to Enoshima equipped with a lot of different cameras. When I arrived home I found myself with a lot of photos of blurred horizons, I didn’t take them thinking in Sugimoto in a conscious way, it was most likely my subconscious that was inspired by him. I was not able to “erase” the horizon line completely in any of them like Sugimoto, but I think some of them were pretty good.
In color with Hipstamatic:
In black and white with the iPhone and with my Canon S90:
And to end up, this photo series of a kite. I was marveled by how he was flying around the horizon line, under it and above it, advancing through the sky like trying to escape from my photos.
