Eikoh Hosoe, an avant-garde photographer who helped pioneer a new kind of art making in postwar Japan, with surreal and often erotically charged images exploring life, death, sexuality and the menace of the nuclear age, died on Sept. 16 in Tokyo. He was 91.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by an adrenal gland tumor, his son, Kenji, said.
Mr. Hosoe “transcended the conventions of photographic practice,” wrote Yasufumi Nakamori, the editor of a 2021 book, “Eikoh Hosoe: Pioneering Post-1945 Japanese Photography,” in his introductory essay. He “transformed the ways in which we think about photography, and overhauled what it meant to be a professional photographer in post-1945 Japan. Artistically, intellectually, and geographically, he helped free the medium of its insular past.”
“There was no artist like him,” Mr. Nakamori, the vice president of arts and culture at the Asia Society and the director of its museum, added by phone.
Mr. Hosoe’s work was both cinematic and painterly. “Man and Woman,” his second solo show, in 1960, featured nudes he had composed as if they were abstract sculptural objects — still lifes that were gorgeous and graphic. In one image, a man’s muscular arm cradles a woman’s seemingly disembodied head; her eyes are wide and startled.
In the mid-1960s, Mr. Hosoe cast the dancer and choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, a friend, as a mythical creature known as the Kamaitachi, an evil spirit that assumes the form of a weasel with knifelike claws, haunting rice fields and slashing unwary farmers.
Mr. Hijikata was a founder of butoh, a subversive kind of dance theater notable for its often naked dancers, their heads shaved and bodies painted a ghostly white. He was a longtime muse for Mr. Hosoe, and the photos they made together — of a naked Mr. Hijikata racing and leaping acrobatically through stark landscapes — plumbed the nightmares Mr. Hosoe had as a child when he was evacuated to the countryside during World War II.
But Mr. Hosoe’s most provocative and strangest work starred the ultranationalist author Yukio Mishima, who died by ritualized suicide, or hara-kiri, in 1970, when he was 45.
One of Japan’s most celebrated writers, Mr. Mishima was the author of multiple novels, plays, poems and essays. He was also a gay man married to a woman with whom he had two children. He idealized the male form, transforming his own through bodybuilding and assembling a private army of 100 young men he called the Shield Society, whose theoretical mission was to protect the Emperor.
Mr. Mishima had seen early images that Mr. Hosoe made of Mr. Hijikata dancing, and he wanted to be photographed the same way — as a dancer. What followed, beginning in 1961, was a series that presented the author, mostly naked, in erotic tableaus paying homage to Renaissance paintings and Christian imagery, with a dreamy, surrealistic overlay and many images of roses. Beautiful memento mori, the photographs seemed to presage Mr. Mishima’s death nine years later. Mr. Hosoe called the series “a subjective documentary.”
The photos made him famous.
Mr. Hosoe was among a group of artists coming up in the 1960s “who were determined to create a new visual language,” said Michael Hoppen, his gallerist.
These artists were deeply affected by the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the bombing of Tokyo, and their point of view was antiwar, anti-authoritarian and anti-traditionalist. They were involved in jazz and film, in Happenings and performance art and the protest movements of the era.
Mr. Hosoe’s work and that of his peers was often presented not in galleries, but in photo books that were beautifully printed with little or no text, following a long Japanese tradition of visual storytelling. The Mishima photo book was called “Ordeal by Roses.”
“It wasn’t the idea of the single heroic image, à la Ansel Adams; it was, ‘I am going to overwhelm you with this battery of visual narrative,’” said Alexandra Munroe, an Asia scholar and a curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
“The Japanese avant-garde, and the photography that was a part of it, is one of the most important art movements of the 20th century, and Hosoe was a key figure,” added Ms. Munroe, who included his photographs in her 1994 Guggenheim show “Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky.” “He emerged as a photographer at a time when photography was becoming a central part of that cultural and often political expression.”
Sandra Phillips, curator emeritus of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said Mr. Hosoe’s work “was both very real and absolutely mythic, which made it fascinating and strange and beautiful.
Toshihiro Hosoe was born on March 18, 1933, one of three sons of Yonejiro and Mitsu Hosoe. He grew up in Yamagata, in north-central Japan, and in Tokyo, where his father was a caretaker of a Shinto shrine. But in the summer of 1944, just before Tokyo was bombed, he was sent to stay with relatives in his mother’s rural hometown. He would later draw upon those memories — and the ghost stories he heard then — for his photographs of Mr. Hijikata as the weasel spirit.
At 18, Mr. Hosoe won first prize in a Fuji photo contest, in the student division. He went on to study at the Tokyo College of Photography, now Tokyo Polytechnic University, graduating in 1954. He also changed his first name to Eikoh. In 1959, he and five other photographers formed a group they called Vivo, after the Esperanto word for life. It was a short-lived but influential collective that was distinguished by its members’ rejection of realism in favor of something more experimental and personal.
Mr. Hosoe worked with a number of artists, dancers and actors, including Kazuo Ohno, who co-founded the butoh dance theater with Mr. Hijikata; their collaboration lasted some 40 years. He also made a photographic series with Simon Yotsuya, an artist and avant-garde actor. And in a collection called “Luna Rossa,” he explored the menace of a changing climate and the threat of nuclear war in images lighted to evoke a nuclear blast.
In an essay for his 2021 monograph, Mr. Hosoe called his work “an elegy to the twentieth century reflected in the mirror within myself.”
“It is a literal — no, a photographic — black and white inversion of the world transcribed onto the surface of a human body,” he added.”
In addition to his son, Mr. Hosoe is survived by his wife, Misako Imai, and two daughters, Kanako Hosoe and Kumiko Takata. His brother Uichiro Hosoe died in World War II; another brother, Isao Hosoe, an architect and designer, died in 2015.
Mr. Hosoe’s work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum. He was famous for his workshops — known as “naked school,” because they involved working with nudes — and for encouraging his students to shoot blindfolded.
But “the most interesting and attractive aspect of photography,” he told Aperture magazine in 2023, “is the simple joy of the people who are photographed. I have always liked human relationships.”
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