JHB Gallery is saddened to mark the passing of artist Hiromitsu Morimoto. Over a career of more than five decades, the New York–based photographer cast his compellingly lyrical eye over a range of subjects: from portraits and the human body to commonplace architectural details, domestic interiors, flowers and landscapes.

Engaging with traditional photographic processes including silver gelatin and platinum printing, often enhanced with graphite or pigments, Morimoto’s work creates its own unique space between painting and photography. Applying liquid emulsions on supports ranging from vellum and linen to watercolor and printmaking papers, the artist individualized exposure and development, resulting in works whose finishes span dark and rich through a barely-there lightness of tone.

A series of silver-on-white works include images of shirts and other garments hung loosely on hangers or draped over limbs, as well as interiors and architectural details whose touching corners and molded contours become softly sensualized. Portraits and nudes in silver gelatin emulsions on linen, on the other hand, achieve a tonal density that pulls subject and support into a tight embrace. Light or dark, Morimoto’s work creates what Tadayasu Sakai, writing on the artist, describes as “a new horizon of seeing”: a sensual merging of figure and ground that pushes toward the thresholds of visibility.

With an instinctive and sometimes idiosyncratic eye for framing and cropping, Morimoto’s work displays a rare ability to elevate the specific to the archetypal—all the while, retaining the sense of longing that lies at the heart of photography’s power.

“In the end, don’t all photographs stir up impossible desires for things we miss? This is because the access they provide to objects whose reality we can never grasp has frozen time through the magical spell of the instant.”
—Tadayasu Sakai

View the exhibition online here.

Hiromitsu Morimoto was born in Yokohama, Japan, in 1942 and studied art at the Art Students League, New York, NY, and California State University, Long Beach, CA. During his lifetime, he had over thirty solo exhibitions internationally, and his work has been included in exhibitions at venues including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Ft. Worth, TX; WestLicht Museum for Photography, Vienna, Austria; C/O, Berlin, Germany; Suenkok Art Museum, Seoul, Korea; XXI São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil; Yokohama Museum of Contemporary Art, Yokohama, Japan; and Connecticut State Art Museum, Storrs, CT. Morimoto’s work can be found in important public collections including Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Brookings Institute, Washington, DC; Japan Foundation, New York, NY; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; and National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan.