Research: Hiroshi Sugimoto. (WK 4)

"For a long time it was my job to stand on cliffs and gaze at the sea, the horizon where it touches the sky. The horizon is not a straight line, but a segment of a great arc. One day, standing atop a lone island peak in a remote sea, the horizon encompassing my entire field of vision, for a moment I was floating in the centre
of a vast basin. But then, as I viewed the horizon encircle me, I had a distinct sensation of the earth as a watery globe, a clear vision of the horizon not as an endless expanse but the edge of an oceanic sphere." -Hiroshi Sugimoto.



Hiroshi Sugimoto uses line as the basis for these two artworks. The photographer took a different approach to photographing the horizon, with the photographs presented side on. There is a distinct line between the sea and sky in both images and at first, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. Not having read the titles I first looked at the images and figured they were part of a piece of architecture, but after reading the titles it became clear what the artist was trying to portray. The contrast between the lighter colour and the dark is amazing, creating the distinct horizon line in the photographs. His photographs have a lot of impact in black and white and for that's one of the reasons I chose to look at his works. The lack of colour helps create less noise in the artwork, the silence almost jumps out to the viewer.

These two images are great examples of positive and negative space, more on the negative space side than anything. The sun and white created by it would be considered the positive space, while the negative is the space around it. The flatness of this image makes it easy to distinguish the two.