The Music Lesson

Hiroshi Sugimoto (b.1948) is a multidisciplinary artist, who is best known for his photography and architecture. Sugimoto’s photographic exhibitions double as art installations, and are described by the artist as ‘space sculpture’. [1] Throughout his career, Sugimoto has used the camera to investigate the passage of time and to raise questions about the nature of perceived ‘reality’. For Sugimoto, the camera is a time-recording device and ‘photography functions as a fossilization of time’. [2]

This photograph, titled The Music Lesson, belongs to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Portraits series that was commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin in 1999 and reproduced for ‘The Origins of Love’ portfolio in 2004. This work reveals Sugimoto’s interest in photographing dioramas, having discovered the camera’s extraordinary capacity to enliven the three-dimensional models found in museum displays.

The Music Lesson is a photograph of a Madame Tussauds’ waxwork recreation of Johannes Vermeer’s (1632–1675) painting, A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman (1662–64). [3] When setting up the shot, Sugimoto used lighting to animate the life-size wax figures, and wittily substituted the reflection of the painter’s easel (observed in Vermeer’s painting) with a glimpse of the photographer’s tripod. Sugimoto moves between two-dimensional and three-dimensional simulations of reality, using the medium of photography to investigate multiple layers of illusion and artifice.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo and studied politics and sociology at Rikkyõ University. He left Japan in 1972 in order to pursue a degree in Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, CA. After graduation he settled in New York City, where he worked as a dealer in Japanese antiquities. Sugimoto currently lives and works in New York and Tokyo.

Vanessa Tothill, January 2022

[1] https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s3/hiroshi-sugimoto-in-memory-segment/ [Accessed 5 January 2022] [2] https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s3/hiroshi-sugimoto-in-memory-segment/ [Accessed 5 January 2022] [3] Royal Collection Trust, object number: RCIN 405346 https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/1/collection/405346/lady-at-the-virginals-with-a-gentleman [Accessed 7 January 2022]