A survey of the work of the Japanese photographer, best known for his controversial collaboration with writer Yukio Mishima, shows the intensity of his vision has not diminished
There is an illuminating photograph of Eikoh Hosoe at work in 1968. His subject is the avant-garde dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, with whom he had collaborated for almost a decade. Hijikata is running barefoot across a field and, just a few feet behind him, Hosoe is leaping in the air while simultaneously pressing the shutter of the camera clasped to his eye. Rather than simply documenting the dancer’s performance, the photographer seems to have joined in the dance.
The image speaks volumes about Hosoe’s fascination with, and immersion in, the Japanese postwar avant garde, as well as his commitment to creating images that constantly challenged conventional notions of what photography should be and could do. For him, it was, above all, about immersive collaboration: the creation of a heightened space in which he attempted to become one with his subject. This idea informed his many creative interactions with Hijikata, the founder of butoh, a form of wildly expressive and physically demanding dance, as well as his most well-known work, Ordeal By Roses, in which he photographed the controversial Japanese novelist, actor, dramatist and ultra-nationalist Yukio Mishima, in a series of darkly homoerotic tableaux.
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