Hiroshi Sugimoto: Enoura Observatory: Land of Distant Memory presents a project that has occupied the artist since the early 2010s: the construction of an art and architectural complex in Odawara, on a citrus-covered hillside between the Hakone Mountains and Sagami Bay. Home to the Odawara Art Foundation, the observatory was conceived as a forum through which Japanese art and culture might be shared both domestically and internationally.

The site brings Sugimoto’s photographic practice into direct relation with his more than two decades of work in sculpture and architecture. Its elements include a hundred-meter gallery, a Noh stage, a reconstruction of a sixteenth-century tea room, the restored Muromachi-period Meigetsu Gate, a strolling garden, and the Winter Solstice Light Worship Tunnel extending toward the bay. Rather than treating these as isolated attractions, the book offers an account of a single multidisciplinary undertaking in which built form, landscape, cultural memory, and the movement of light are mutually dependent.

Enoura Observatory also connects ancient and contemporary Japanese traditions. Sugimoto worked with techniques maintained by artisans in the Odawara region—forms of knowledge that have become increasingly difficult to preserve. His stated ambition is broad in historical reach: to evoke a Japanese culture extending back to the prehistoric Jomon period and grounded in living with nature. The observatory therefore functions not simply as a setting for art, but as an argument about continuity: how inherited materials, skills, rituals, and spatial ideas can remain active in the present.

For collectors attentive to the points where photography crosses into architecture, landscape, and institutional authorship, this MW Editions volume warrants close consideration. Sugimoto is at once the artist associated with the publication and the maker of the place it records. That unusual alignment gives the book particular documentary and conceptual weight: it gathers a long-term project in which the camera is only one component of a larger inquiry into time, perception, and cultural transmission.