(A polar bear on a fake ice floe contemplates his fresh-killed seal; vultures fight over carrion in front of painted skies; exotic monkeys hoot in a plastic jungle.

[11] The luminescent screen in the centre of the composition, the architectural details and the seats of the theatre are the only subjects that register owing to the long exposure of each photograph, while the unique lighting gives the works a surreal look, as a part of Sugimoto's attempt to reveal time in photography.

"[13] In 1980 he began working on an ongoing series of photographs of the sea and its horizon, Seascapes, in locations all over the world, using an old-fashioned large-format camera to make exposures of varying duration (up to three hours).

[19] Shot from a high vantage point[5] and editing out all architectural features, the resulting 48 photographs[5] concentrate on the bodhisattvas, 1,000 life-size and almost identical gilded figures carved from wood in the 12th and 13th centuries, that are banked up inside the building.

In July 2003 Sugimoto travelled to St. Louis to photograph the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, designed by Tadao Ando whose work he had portrayed various times before.

However, his ended up photographing Richard Serra's sculpture Joe (the first in his "Torqued Spiral" series), which rests in an outdoor courtyard, at dawn and at dusk for five days.

The blurring effect results from Sugimoto's unconventional use of the flexibility of the large format camera, whereby he sets the distance between the lens and the film to half the focal length, in his words "twice-infinity".

"[27] When the Pulitzer Arts Foundation decided to publish a book about the series, Sugimoto asked Jonathan Safran Foer, whom he had met years earlier, to write a text to accompany the nineteen selected photographs.

The Mechanical forms – machine models including gears, pumps and regulators – are industrial tools used to demonstrate basic movements of modern machinery.

[29] For the series Stylized Sculpture (2007), Sugimoto selected distinctive garments by celebrated couturiers from the collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute, shot in chiaroscuro on headless mannequins—from Madeleine Vionnet's precociously modern T-dress and Balenciaga's wasp-waisted billowing ensemble to Yves St Laurent's strict geometric Mondrian shift and Issey Miyake's sail-like slip.

[30] For his 2009 series Lightning Fields Sugimoto abandoned the use of the camera, producing photographs using a 400,000 volt Van de Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto the film.

[11] Instead of placing an object on photo-sensitive paper, then exposing it to light, he produced the image by causing electrical sparks to erupt over the on surface of a 7-by-2.5-foot sheet of film laid on a large metal tabletop.

No cash exchanged hands, rather a barter agreement which allows Sugimoto to use the band's song "No Line on the Horizon" (partly inspired by the "Boden Sea" image) in any future project.

[33] In 2009, Sugimoto acquired some rare negatives made by Henry Fox Talbot in the 1840s and retrieved through an intensely fragile process what "looks remarkably like Plato's shadows in the cave".

[35] On the occasion of Art Basel in 2012, Sugimoto presented Couleurs de l'Ombre, 20 different colorful scarf designs in editions of just seven, all created – using a new inkjet printing method – for French fashion label Hermès.

His recent projects include an architectural commission at Naoshima Contemporary Art Center in Japan, for which Sugimoto designed and built a Shinto shrine.

[39] The first in a series of temporary artist-designed structures at the Le Stanze del Vetro museum on view during the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014, a Sugimoto-designed glass teahouse was set over a tiled pool and had the traditional tea ceremony performed for the public in it.

In 2007, a European retrospective began at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2007) and traveled to the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland.

[3] His exhibition, "Lost Human Genetic Archive", at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2016, incorporated selected images from Dioramas, Seascapes, Theaters and the Sanjūsangen-dō series, among others.

The project includes an original 15th-century entrance gate, a minimalist exhibition space, a modern Japanese teahouse, and a contemporary Noh theater with a stage that appears to float above the sea.