Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has captured breathtaking views of the sea from a perspective rooted in conceptual art. Sugimoto, who studied art in California in the early 1970s and who divides his time between Tokyo and New York, merges traditional Eastern ideas about the creative process with a 1960s Western minimalist approach. In much of his work, he contrasts light and darkness, void and substance. Sugimoto's seascapes, for which he has traveled around the world, are precisely planned: the horizon appears at dead center and all details of the place are avoided (he includes no land, no ships, and no bird in the sky). The artist has said that his aim, in this series, is to evoke the emotional response of early man when he first encountered the vast open sea.

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