Discover the dream-like photography of Tokyo’s Mr Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Seeing is not necessarily believing when it comes to the work of Tokyo’s Mr Hiroshi Sugimoto. “I want to give people the questions,” he says. “Is what you’re looking at, actually what you’re looking at?” Take his “Portraits” series, where historical figures such as Lenin, Pope John Paul II and Henry VIII and his sextet of wives shine out against sepulchral backgrounds. They look uncannily lifelike, if a bit… waxy. It turns out that Mr Sugimoto made the portraits in various Madame Tussaud’s franchises around the world. Similarly, Mr Sugimoto didn’t venture to the African savannah or the Alaskan tundra for his wildlife studies of vultures and wolves; he simply placed his camera in front of the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Mr Sugimoto’s other major series are equally preoccupied with visual paradoxes, and what he calls “the camera’s ability to capture more than a single moment”. For “Theatres”, the protracted exposure time favoured by Mr Sugimoto results in the brilliant white screen of an entire, condensed movie playing to an empty cinema, while his blurry, deserted, almost abstract “Seascapes” photographs “relate to the memory of ancient human life”. But you don’t need to know any of this to appreciate the eerie beauty of Mr Sugimoto’s dream-like images, or to understand why they’re highly prized by museums and collectors. A handsome new monograph on the artist named Black Box – linked to an exhibition currently touring Spain – rewards the same prolonged contemplation that Mr Sugimoto lavishes on his subjects. After all, as he says, in what amounts to his credo: “Life is one long exposure.”