resulting 48 photographs concentrate on the bodhisattvas, 1,000 life-size and almost identical gilded figures carved from wood in the 12th and 13th centuries, that are banked up inside the building. In 1997, on a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Sugimoto began producing series of large-format photographs of notable buildings around the world. In 2003, the museum showed the series in a sepulchral installation, with the pictures installed on layered rows of dark-painted partitions. Sugimoto's later Architecture series (2000–03) consists of blurred images of well-known examples of Modernist architecture. In 2001, Sugimoto traveled the length of Japan, visiting the so-called meisho "famous sites" for pines: Miho no Matsubara, Matsushima, Amanohashidate. On the royal palace grounds in Tokyo, Sugimoto photographed a pine landscape, copying a traditional 16th-century Japanese ink-painting style. Listed as Japanese national treasures, the Shōrin-zu byōbu (Pine Forest Screens) (ca. 1590) by Momoyama period (1568 1600) painter Hasegawa Tōhaku (1539–1610) represent a coming of age in Japanese imaging. Joe In July 2003 Sugimoto travelled to St. Louis to photograph the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, designed by Tadao Ando whose work he had portrayed various times before. However, his ended up photographing Richard Serra's sculpture Joe (the first in his "Torqued Spiral" series), which rests in an outdoor courtyard, at dawn and at dusk for five days. The resulting Joe series was made with short exposure. The blurring effect results from Sugimoto's unconventional use of the flexibility of the large format camera, whereby he sets the distance between the lens and the film to half the focal length, in his words "twice-infinity". Sugimoto gave the photographs serial numbers from his Architecture series. Significantly, the hand-developed gelatin-silver photographs are mounted on aluminum panels but are otherwise unframed, unglazed and unlaminated to draw attention to what Sugimoto describes as the "transformation from the three-dimensional steel source sculpture to the thin layers of what I would call my 'silver sculpture'." When the Pulitzer Arts Foundation decided to publish a book about the series, Sugimoto asked Jonathan Safran Foer, whom he had met years earlier, to write a text to accompany the nineteen selected photographs. A 2004 series comprises large photographs of antique mathematical and mechanical models, which Sugimoto came across in Tokyo and shot from slightly below. The Mathematical forms – stereometric models in plaster – were created in the 19th century to provide students with a visual understanding of complex