For thirty years, Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) has made a strong impact on contemporary photography. His minimalist black-and-white images, each exploring a different theme and created according to a precise protocol, are studies in silence, clarity and emptiness. Sugimoto, a resident of the United States since 1970, unites Far Eastern aesthetics with techniques and themes derived from Western modernity. Among his best-known series of photographs are Dioramas, animal scenes shot in natural history museums; Theaters, images of drive-ins and luxurious theatres of the 1920s converted into movie houses; Seascapes, poetic and minimalist evocations of marine landscapes;and Architecture, out-of-focus photographs of historically important buildings. Sugamoto's works can be seen as meditations on time and space, presence and absence, reality and illusion. A major retrospective of his works is being held in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 2007-2008.