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One of the most striking pieces in "End of Time," the career retrospective of legendary Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto now running at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, is a portrait of Japan's controversial World War II and postwar Emperor, Hirohito. The black-and-white, 1.5 m by 1.2 m print is astonishing in its crisp detail. Hirohito is seated and wearing full morning dress, and every crease of his jowl, every fold of his trousers, every line on the knuckles of his fingers is finely articulated. It is almost as if the Emperor is sitting there, in the museum, 17 years after his death.

The brilliance of the work rests not just upon the quality of the print's resolution, however, but also upon this conceptual turn: the photo is not really of the Emperor, but of his wax figure at Madame Tussaud's museum in London. Wax statues look almost laughably fake in person, but Sugimoto exploits the power (or perhaps the weakness) of the camera's single eye to flatten perspective and encourage illusion, thereby creating an image that looks more real, more human than the wax object he is photographing. In the next room are similar shots of King Henry VIII of England and his six wives. In Sugimoto's rendering, it is as if the royals had traveled from the 16th century to sit for official portraits. Subverting our assumptions about reality and illusion has long been one of the bedrocks of Sugimoto's career. "Ever since photography was invented," he explains, "it has been credited with providing credibility"—hence the adage that the camera never lies. This is a fallacy he revels in exploding: "I feel lucky to be working during a time when people still tend to believe the photograph actually is what it seems to be. I use this belief as one of the tools of my art."

The limited nature of photographic realism is just one of the weighty themes explored in this exhilarating exhibition, which runs in Tokyo until Jan. 9 before moving to the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and then to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. The retrospective spans 30 years, incorporating 104 of Sugimoto's best works, pieces that bring fresh insight to philosophical dualities such as permanence and transience, perception and experience, time and nothingness. While Sugimoto, 57, has been the focus of one-man shows at the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, this is the first time viewers can sample in one place the entire career of one of Japan's most important artists. The exhibition is long overdue not just because it highlights his consistently excellent work, but because it showcases a somewhat neglected version of modern Japanese art—somber, contemplative, melancholy and utterly different from the fun but shallow Day-Glo Superflat school popularized by neopop superstar Takashi Murakami and his look-alike minions.

Anything but superficial, Sugimoto relentlessly probes such issues as the difference between what we consider real and fake. In his Diorama series, for example, he turns his attention to those hokey installations at natural-history museums with painted backgrounds and stuffed-animal wildlife scenes or mannequins of Neanderthals hunting. As in Portraits, the dioramas look far more realistic in Sugimoto's presentation than in the museums themselves. Among these delightfully jarring, anachronistic images is a pseudodocumentary photo of Cro-Magnons building a hut. Sugimoto is well aware of the irony that he, like the creators of such dioramas, is practicing a vanishing art. It's not simply that digital photography is quickly becoming more popular than traditional film. It's that his tools—an 8 inch by 10 inch box camera, silver-emulsion film, and fiber-based paper—are virtually extinct. "The materials I use are becoming endangered species," he says. "A few months ago, my paper maker went bankrupt. I'm negotiating with the new owner to see if they are going to keep making my type of paper if I order enough per year. Kodak stopped making the kind of film I use several years ago, so I have had to search for new makers. Some Baltic countries still make the very rich black-and-white I need, but the quality is unreliable."

In a series called Theaters, Sugimoto uses movies and movie houses to probe the nature of light and time. Traveling to some of America's finest Beaux Arts and Art Deco theaters, Sugimoto shoots their interiors by keeping his camera lens open during an entire film screening. Burning a complete movie into a single photographic frame leaves every print a glowing, radiant white. These photos are thus not just gorgeous documentation of theater interiors (some of them now demolished) but the screens are encapsulations of two hours of light, motion and experience into one dazzling instant.

Seascapes, another of Sugimoto's most famous series, are photographs of horizons, where the water meets the sky, taken all over the world, in all types of weather. From afar, they are pure blocks of contrasting shade. Light on top, dark on the bottom (or sometimes, intriguingly, the reverse), they look at first like little more than a homage to Mark Rothko's color-field painting. But up close, each photo is marvelously detailed. Wisps of clouds are clearly defined and individual wave crests reflect the sun at different but interlacing angles. Displayed together so that the horizons all line up perfectly, the Seascapes are haunting in their simple, minimalist beauty. With a title like "End of Time," there is no doubt that this artist and this exhibition take themselves very seriously—but given the show's transcendent power, the seeming self-importance is not just well placed, it may even be understated.

• Jim Frederick | Tokyo
• A Tokyo retrospective of the work of Japan's legendary Hiroshi Sugimoto plays with illusion and reality