Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Jekyll and Hyde Year

The artist famous for his riddling photos has turned to old-fashioned function and grace in his design for the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden. So why doesn’t Washington love it?

Hiroshi Sugimoto laughs. He laughs a lot. On a Zoom call from Tokyo, the 73-year-old artist laughs at his first reaction to the avant-garde while living in New York in the 1970s: “It’s a very twisted-mind art, so this kind of twisted mind — it can be applied to myself! I’m the same kind of animal!”