A Quote by Hiroshi Sugimoto

It's pre-photography, a fossilization of time, Americans have done the Zen garden to death. I wanted to do something different. — © Hiroshi Sugimoto
It's pre-photography, a fossilization of time, Americans have done the Zen garden to death. I wanted to do something different.
To me photography functions as a fossilization of time.
Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head.
There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.
What I term Zen, old Zen, the original face of Zen, new Zen, pure Zen, or Tantric Zen is - Zen in its essence.
Bodhidharma who brought Zen from India to the Orient, taught a very pure Zen - in that it was pure Zen. He wanted to show that the way still existed and wanted to get back to its essence.
When a garden is used as a place to pause for thought, that is when a Zen garden comes to life. When you contemplate a garden like this it will form as lasting impression on your heart.
The French have a different take on photography than Americans do. They consider photography to be absolutely parallel to literature. That often makes for a deeper perception of the work.
Different schools of Zen have evolved, principally the Rinzai and Soto orders. A whole hierarchy has developed for the teaching and practice of Zen. Zen has become, to a certain degree, institutionalized.
In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
Tantric Zen is for someone who is really broad-minded. It is Bodhidharma's Zen, your Zen, my Zen. Which doesn't mean I have a problem with Japanese Zen. Most Japanese Zen is minding your p's and q's.
If my career was a basketball season, I'm in the pre-season still. I'm not blowing everybody out by 40 - there's so much work to be done, and there's no time to really sit and look back and be proud of what I've done yet, because it's the pre-season still.
I snap at people I love all the time, and that makes me feel bad about myself. I want to be Zen. I am so not Zen. Whatever Zen is, I'm the opposite of it.
Photojournalism is photography with more story telling. A single image can be amazing and dramatic. I started out shooting individual images, but I found I wanted to have more of a voice: to actually say something. I wanted to do something more personal over a long period of time, with more authorship.
The thing about 'On the Doll,' I was doing 'Nip/Tuck' at the time, and I was doing only 5 or 6 scenes an episode. So I had some free time, and I wanted to do something completely different than what I've ever done before.
And finally, be assured that Zen asks nothing even as it promises nothing. One can be a Protestant Zen Buddhist, a Catholic Zen Buddhist or a Jewish Zen Buddhist. Zen is a quiet thing. It listens.
Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography.
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