Eikoh Hosoe

Eikoh Hosoe (b. 1933, Yamagata) is one of the most influential Japanese photographers in the history of the medium. This comprehensive volume will be the primary resource on Hosoe’s oeuvre, edited, designed, and produced under the artist’s direction and with the collaboration of internationally renowned curator and scholar Yasufumi Nakamori.

Since the mid-1950s, Eikoh Hosoe has been at the forefront of photographic practice in Japan: as an image-maker encompassing a broad range of subjects; a curator introducing works of master European and American photographers to Japan in 1968; a teacher informing the careers of numerous distinguished photographers, such as Daido Moriyama. He co-established an influential lens-based art journal, co-founded the photographic cooperative Vivo and later the progressive Photography Workshop, created a university education curriculum and photography collection, and exhibited and published numerous books and catalogs of his own photographs in Japan. In the process, he pioneered the establishment of postwar Japanese photography, rescuing the medium from the pre-existing modes of documentary and realism and positioning it at a new nexus of art, literature, performance, and film.

This career-defining publication not only features Hosoe’s major photographic series but also reveals his lesser-known collaborative works with writers, critics, dancers, and artists, including Yayoi Kusama, in portraiture and beyond. Additionally, the volume includes two newly-commissioned essays offering new perspectives on Hosoe’s oeuvre, alongside reprints of a selection of previously-published seminal essays on Hosoe by a range of Japanese writers, including the novelist Yukio Mishima and the art critic Shuzo Takiguchi. As well as serving as a survey of Hosoe’s work, this book uncovers the essential protagonists of Japanese art, photography, dance, and literature across the post-1945 era.

An undisputed masterwork among Japanese photobooks, Eikoh Hosoe and Tatsumi Hijikata's "Kamaitachi" was originally released in 1969 as a limited edition of 1,000 copies.

Hosoe, the renowned photographer, and Hijikata, the founder of ankoku butoh dance, had visited a farming village in northern Japan, where Hijikata improvised a performance inspired by the legend of a weasel-like demon named Kamaitachi. As Hosoe photographed Hijikata's spontaneous interactions with the landscape and with the people they encountered, the two artists together enacted an intense investigation of tradition and an exploration, both personal and symbolic, of contemporary convulsions in Japanese society.

In 2005, Aperture published a limited-edition facsimile in homage to the original, in close consultation with the artist; now, they have made this enchanting body of work available in its first ever affordable trade edition, which was painstakingly reworked by renowned graphic artist Ikko Tanaka--the designer of the original volume--shortly before his death. His reinterpretation of this classic book object, which is truly a paragon of Japanese bookmaking, includes as a special bonus four never-before-published images from the classic Kamaitachi series.

Eikoh Hosoe was born in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, in 1933. He is an integral part of the history of modern Japanese photography, and remains a driving force not only for his own work, but also for his efforts as a teacher and ambassador, fostering artistic exchange between Japan and the outside world. Hosoe lives in Tokyo and is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

Overview of Hosoe's career to date which includes images from many of his books including "Barakei," "Man and Woman," and "Embrace," plus portraits, nudes and architectural studies. This is the first monograph on Hosoe published in the United States.