Eikoh Hosoe
Visionary

Eikoh Hosoe is undoubtedly among the most important masters of photography since World War II. Eikoh Hosoe was born in Yonezawa, Yamagata Prefecture in 1933 and was brought up in Tokyo. At age 18, he decided to become a photographer. Since then, for almost half a century, he has been producing epoch-making works and has established himself as an internationally acclaimed photographer of postwar Japan. In 1960, amidst the anti-Security Treaty movement, Hosoe released Man and Woman, in which the human body was turned into a naked object, vividly depicting the drama of the rivalry between the two sexes on an equal basis. Featured in this series was Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of Butoh dance.

In 1963, Hosoe published a book of photographs entitled Barakei [Ordeal By Roses], in which a baroque-like world of aestheticism was structured with Yukio Mishima as the subject. This work won international fame. Hosoe's collaboration with Hijikata was further deepened and resulted in the form of Kamaitachi (1969), another book depicting the quintessence of Japanese landscape and its fissures.

It was in the early 1970s that Mishima committed suicide and Hijikata ceased to perform on stage. During the same period, Hosoe's work also underwent transfomation. To begin with, Embrace, his book published in 1971, once again focused on the dialogue between men and women and extracted the essence of life by cleverly abstracting the flesh. Meanwhile, he also presented his works extensively abroad, mainly in the United States. Hosoe was also enthusiastic about participating in social activities and promoted photographic education by holding workshops in Japan and abroad and helped establish public collections of photographs.

Having been enchanted by the great achievements of Gaudi in Barcelona, Hosoe began taking pictures of Gaudi's architecture from the late 1970s. The Cosmos of Gaudi, which was published in 1984, opened up a new path. With a growing sense of crisis in the nuclear age, Hosoe was working on Luna Rossa in the early 1990s. In his latest work, People Concerned with the Works, which appear in public for the first time in this show, Hosoe looks back on his photographic career and incorporates a new sense of time, which connects the present and the past like a torus. This exhibition consists of over 200 representative works by Hosoe, including a large number of vintage prints, with plenty of additional references. By examining the opulently dynamic photographic world presented by a single person over a period of five decades, we hope to be able to ponder what it is that Hosoe has been questioning and to what he wishes to appeal.