The Sigma Foundation was founded by Kazuto Yamaki, president of Sigma Corporation, to support and promote photography as an art form. Sigma is a Japanese manufacturer of photographic lenses and cameras. A deep respect for the arts guides Sigma’s engineering, as the company continues to develop and innovate products that support the passion of artists. As part of our commitment to supporting the arts, Sigma Foundation collaborates with artists from around the world to produce and showcase their work, regardless of whether they use Sigma products.
Trevor Key
Trevor Key’s collaborative and experimental photographic practice spanned over twenty years (1972–1995). This book is the first to honor his processes and prescience and is an enduring visual love letter to the future of image-making. Trevor Key is a timely reminder of the proto-digital, practical photographic magic that Key’s photographs embody.
Over the course of Key’s creative journey, he chose like-mindedly exacting conceptual thinkers, including art directors Jamie Reid, David James and Peter Saville with whom he would imagine, visually problem solve, and take creative risks. Within the visual heart of this book is Key and Saville’s experimental collaboration that ventured beyond the confines of commissioned album covers into a personal quest that Saville and Key shared to rethink image-making and have a truly independent and speculative creative flow.
The book is edited and designed by Stockholm Design Lab, with focus on Trevor Keys unique still life photography. In the book’s conversation between Key’s collaborator and celebrated art director Peter Saville and writer and curator Charlotte Cotton, Saville gives a detailed and deeply personal account of the context, practices and radical shifts in visual culture that he and Key created together.
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Sølve Sundsbø
Born in Norway and based in London, photographer Sølve Sundsbø is internationally acclaimed for his pioneering approach to photography and film. Seamlessly blending cutting-edge technology with a refined artistic sensibility, Sundsbø transforms everyday subjects into extraordinary visual experiences, continuously expanding the boundaries of contemporary image-making.
In his latest work, Hanataba, Sundsbø explores the concept of “sublimely beautiful forms of life – which don’t exist.” Using a vast archive of his own flower photographs, he developed a custom AI program to generate entirely new, otherworldly floral creations—images of flowers that have never existed in reality.
Each piece is accompanied by a fictitious Latin botanical name generated by the AI, resulting in a poetic compendium that resembles a field guide to flora from another realm.
A dialogue between human creativity and artificial intelligence, Hanataba casts new light on the relationship between art and technology, marking a significant milestone in Sølve Sundsbø’s ongoing exploration of visual expression.
Julia Hetta
Julia Hetta is a Swedish photographer renowned for her quiet, painterly compositions. Shaped by an acute sensitivity to natural light, her images possess a restrained yet unmistakable force, earning her wide international acclaim.
Her latest work, Songen, was produced as part of the Sigma Foundation and its residency program in Aizu, Japan—home to Sigma’s only manufacturing facility. Accompanied by her longtime friend and former assistant, Shin Yatagai, she traveled to Aizu for the first time.
As she moved between her native Sweden and the unfamiliar landscape of Aizu, Hetta discovered unexpected points of resonance between the two places. In this shifting context, roles quietly reversed: Shin, once an outsider in Hetta’s home city of Stockholm, became the host in Aizu.
Through this subtle inversion, Hetta re-engaged with Shin’s character and way of thinking, arriving at a shared sensibility shaped by nature, silence, dignity, and mutual respect.
The word “songen” (dignity in Japanese) emerged naturally from Shin’s inner reflections, and has a serendipitous connection to the word “sången” (song in Swedish). It became both the title of the book and the key concept running through the work.
The relationship between Julia and Shin, and that between Sweden and Aizu in Japan, are woven together through her fundamental approach to image-making—working with nothing but herself and the camera. From this origin, a quiet and beautiful saga unfolds.
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