Yasufumi Nakamori - Eikoh Hosoe (signed)

Yasufumi Nakamori
Eikoh Hosoe (signed)

Published by Mack Books, September 2021
Size: 32.5 x 25 cm
400 pages
Language: English
Signed by Eikoh Hosoe on a paper attached to the end of the book (see photo).

Probably the best retrospective on this pioneer of Japanese photography, Eikoh Hosoe!

Eikoh Hosoe (born 1933 in Yamagata) is one of the most influential Japanese photographers in the history of photography. This comprehensive volume will be the primary resource on Hosoe's work, edited, designed, and produced under the artist's direction and with the collaboration of Yasufumi Nakamori, an internationally renowned curator and researcher.

Since the mid-1950s, Eikoh Hosoe has been at the forefront of photographic practice in Japan: as a maker of images encompassing a wide range of subjects; as a curator introducing works by leading European and American photographers to Japan in 1968; and as a professor influencing the careers of many prominent photographers, such as Daido Moriyama. He co-founded an influential lens-based art journal, the photographic cooperative Vivo and, later, the Progressive Photography Workshop, a university teaching program and photography collection, and exhibited and published numerous books and catalogs of his own photographs in Japan. In doing so, he paved the way for the establishment of postwar Japanese photography, rescuing the medium from preexisting modes of documentary and realism and positioning it at a new junction between art, literature, performance, and film.

This career-defining publication not only presents Hosoe's major photographic series but also reveals her lesser-known collaborations with writers, critics, dancers, and artists, including Yayoi Kusama, in the field of portraiture and beyond. In addition, the volume includes two newly commissioned essays offering new perspectives on Hosoe's work, as well as reprints of selected seminal essays on Hosoe previously published by various Japanese writers, including novelist Yukio Mishima and art critic Shuzo Takiguchi. In addition to serving as a survey of Hosoe's work, this book highlights key figures in post-1945 Japanese art, photography, dance, and literature.