Eikoh Hosoe

(b Yonezawa, 18 March 1933). Japanese photographer. He graduated from Tokyo College of Photography in 1951 and first exhibited in a one-man show An American Girl in Tokyo (1956; Tokyo, Konishiroku Gal.), a depiction of his friendship with an American girl. Hosoe became one of the leading photographers of the Vivo (Esperanto: 'Life') group formed in 1959 with Ikko Narahara and Shomei Tomatsu and others. In 1960 he published Otoko to onna ('Man and woman'), nude portraits of the buto dancer Tatsumi Hijikata and people in his group photographed in harsh contrast. His style expressed the struggle between the human body and the spirit, sometimes as fantasy, sometimes directly. He continued to evolve this style in such collections as Barakei ('Killed by roses'; Tokyo, 1963; rev. 2/1971/R 1985) for which the writer Yukio Mishima modelled; the fantasy comedy Kamaitachi ('A weasel's slash'; Tokyo, 1969), set in a rural village; and Hoyo ('Embrace'; Tokyo, 1971) which is a more abstract version of Otoko to onna. From 1977, he began to photograph the architecture of Antoni Gaud? and the results are collected in Gaud? no uchu ('The universe of Gaud?'; Tokyo, 1984).

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Hosoe, Eikoh (b. 1933), Japanese photographer. Trained at Tokyo Junior College of Photography (now Tokyo Polytechnic), he co-founded the group VIVO in 1959 with Shomei Tomatsu, Kikuji Kawada, Ikko Narahara, and Yasuhiro Ishimoto. Its members encouraged each other to experiment with both subject matter and print technique. With Vivo, Hosoe's style evolved towards high-contrast and graphic expression. In his first major series of nudes, Man and Woman (1960, pub. 1961), he created images remarkable both for the contrastiness of the prints and for their vision of human relationships. Before Vivo's demise in 1962, Hosoe produced Barakei (Ordeal by Roses), an intense photo portrait of the novelist Yukio Mishima. In his series Kamaitachi (1969) and Embrace (1971) Hosoe collaborated with Hijikata Tatsumi, the founder of butoh dance in Japan. An enthusiastic traveller and fluent English speaker, Hosoe often participated in the photographic workshops in Carmel, California, with Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and others, and at the Arles Festival, France. From the late 1980s he promoted the study and use of platinum prints in Japan. He became a professor at Tokyo Polytechnic and helped to create the Shadai Gallery. He encouraged the establishment of photography departments in Japanese museums and in 1995 became director of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts. His recent work was published in the book Luna Rossa in 2000. He has won many Japanese and foreign awards.

— Madeleine Hill Vedel

Bibliography

• Japon des avant-gardes, 1910-1970 (1986)

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