Eikoh Hosoe is one of Japan’s notable post-war photographers and filmmakers. He was born in 1933 in Yamagata prefecture as Toshihio Hosoe and changed his name to Eikoh after the Second World War, to symbolize the new Japan he was photographing. He is widely acknowledged as a pioneer of the expressionistic style of the period.
In 1961 the great modern Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, asked Hosoe to photograph him, giving him full artistic direction in making the surreal and alluring series Ba-ra-kei (Ordeal by Roses). Set in Mishima’s Tokyo house the props that surround the writer and the baroque interior of his home are antithetical to the pure Japanese sensibility of understatement and reveal the authors dark, theatrical imagination (Mishima would follow his fantasies, eventually committing suicide by seppuku in 1970). Mishima’s avant garde writing displays a blend of modern and traditional aesthetics that break cultural boundaries, with their focus on sexuality, death and political change. Ideas that echo Hosoe’s own political radicalism and produced the extraordinary collaboration that is Ordeal by Roses (first published in book form in 1963).
“To me photography can be simultaneously both a record and a mirror or window of self-expression… the camera is generally assumed to be unable to depict that which is not visible to the eye and yet, the photographer who wields it well can depict what lies unseen in his memory.”
- Eikoh Hosoe
ARMORY 2016, PIER 92, BOOTH 124
