The Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has dedicated much of his career to capturing earth’s most basic elements: water and air. ‘So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention,’ he says, ‘and yet they vouchsafe our very existence.’

He began his series of seascapes in 1980 and has since produced more than 200 black-and-white photographs of the horizon line where the sky meets the sea. In some, the landscape is rendered in exquisite detail; in others, including Ligurian Sea, Saviore, it’s rather blurred. They all, however, evoke a sense of timelessness. ‘Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security,’ says Sugimoto.