“Take art as your weapon and use it to destroy the present and create the future.” This was the motto of the Democrats, a group of young artists in post-War Japan who were searching for new subjects and new approaches in their work, which spanned mediums from painting to photography to dance and theater.
Art in post-War Japan was a blend of tradition and radical experimentation. This period — the 1950s and ’60s — saw the creation of butoh, a highly stylized dance theater that took as its central method the idea of evocation: the goal was not to portray an emotional state through actions that reflected a literal interpretation, but through images that referred to it more or less obliquely. This period also saw the emergence of Yukio Mishima, considered by many to be Japan’s greatest writer of the latter twentieth century, along with radical forms of conceptual art and performance (Yoko Ono, aside from her notoriety as John Lennon’s wife, was a respected conceptual artist and was associated with the neo-Dada group Fluxus); a new music blending Japanese traditions with Western forms (a stance beautifully realized in the music of Toru Takemitsu); and a brand of photography that sought, against the influence of the documentary realism espoused by Ken Domon, personal metaphor as the basis for art. Eikoh Hosoe is one of a group of exceptional photographers who established their reputations in this period.
Eikoh Hosoe presents selections from Hosoe’s work up to 1986, beginning with a group from Man and Woman (1959-60). Hosoe has tended to work in series, allowing ideas to develop over a sequence of images, and there is a strong element of abstraction in his work, along with an element of surrealism that was common to much Japanese art of the period. All of these traits are reflected in this section, brief as it is — there are only four images from the series. The selections from Barakei, Hosoe’s project in which Yukio Mishima is the artist’s primary model, extend this imagery into a powerful dream sequence (the book Barakei has been reissued, and is an extremely potent statement of Mishima’s legend filtered through Hosoe’s vision.) This was a complex project, not only utilizing the author as primary model, but other models — including the dancer Hijikata and members of his company, props, and a range of printing techniques to produce a sequence in which symbolism, as arcane as it might be, takes on a central role. Kamaitachi, using the dancer Hijikata again as a model, is an extended study based on Hosoe’s experiences as an evacuee from Tokyo in the final days of World War II. Embrace utilizes four of Hijikata’s dancers in another extended study of men and women, and is a sequence in which abstraction takes ride of place. The book ends with a group of studio portraits and two series: photographs of the work of Antonio Gaudi and a narrative study titled Shifukei (Simon: A Private Landscape). The latter returns to the theme of alienation, previously explored in Kamaitachi in a study of the life of a contemporary transvestite.
Any artist worth beans is going to change over time, and Hosoe is a prime example. Early in his career, as evidenced in Man and Woman and Barakei, Hosoe’s photographs are the result of a process involving a high degree of manipulation of the images during processing. This provides, in Barakei, dreamlike images of breathtaking power in which the technical aspects reflect the thematic content perfectly: space is dissolved into a mutable fabric in which images ranging from erotic to horrific combine and dissipate in a sequence that is almost cinematic. In Kamaitachi, Hosoe has moved into a more fundamental working mode: manipulation is minimal; the power comes from Hosoe’s keen sense of composition and lighting, which is even more marked (and less extreme) in Shifukei.
As a capsule study of the career of a major contemporary artist, Eikoh Hosoe is well worth seeking out. Sadly, it is but a capsule — Hosoe’s work is an eye-opener for those accustomed to the f64-Weston-Ansel Adams school of modernism in photography. The reproductions are superb, the selection intelligent, and Ronald J. Hill’s Afterword is scholarly, perceptive, and contains a wealth of information about Hosoe’s context and philosophy.
(Friends of Photography, 1986)
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