My inspiration - Part 1 - Hiroshi Sugimonto

• Sugimoto was born in Tokyo, in 1948, and now splits his time between there and New York. 
• His main preoccupation as an artist is with time, and how best to capture its meaning. 
• His tool is the camera, and he self-deprecatingly likes to say that he applied to study photography because it was the easiest discipline to be accepted in at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he received his BFA in Fine Arts. 
• But given the last century’s long debate about the value and place of photography in fine art, Sugimoto’s body of work is proof that the medium belongs firmly alongside sculpture and painting. If a photograph is a record of what we see, then Sugimoto is obsessed with how we see. 
• One of his earliest and most impressive series is the ongoing Dioramas series, which he began in the mid 1970s, in which he photographed prehistoric scenes of life on display at the American Museum of Natural History.

Sugimoto is a master of the long exposure and the large-format camera; the scenes are static and preserved, but in the true black and white tones of his gelatin silver prints, they are not entirely lifeless, either.
Sugimoto’s ability to trick the eye – even in just an instant – juxtaposed with his open acknowledgement of the scene’s artificiality, demonstrates both his playful curiosity and also his rigorous technique.
‘The stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake,’ Sugimoto has said before of the Dioramas photographs. ‘Yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I’d found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.’

Sugimoto has inspired me completely because he gave me the idea on which to focus.
The passing of time. The fact that human movement in long exposure doesn't exist.
All that's left is the nature, the movement of the sea, the sky and so on.