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Eikoh Hosoe: Photographer of the Avant-Garde
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19809 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
1,595 Words |
| Author
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Darwin Marable
Darwin Marable is a photo historian, writer, lecturer, and
independent curator based in the San Francisco Bay area. |
When thinking about cameras and photography, the names Cannon, Nikon, and Minolta immediately come to mind. Japanese expertise in the development of photographic technology is certainly well known. But who knows the names of individual Japanese photographers? Eikoh Hosoe is a pivotal figure in the history of postwar Japanese photography because it was he who introduced a sense of experimentation and freedom into a medium bound in a traditional mode.
Eikoh Hosoe was born in 1933 in Yonezawa City, Yamagata-Ken, and, as his father was a Shinto priest, he was brought up in a Shinto shrine in Tokyo. This experience deeply influenced his taste for the spiritual, as well as developed his interest in photography. His father's interest in photography as a pastime changed dramatically after the war when Shinto, associated with the wartime parties, diminished in importance. To supplement a weakened income, his father began photographing visitors to the shrine and children in the schools. It was during these difficult years that Hosoe began assisting his father's photography business. Then, during his senior year in high school, Hosoe won the grand prize for students in a Fuji photo contest at which point he decided to make a career of photography.
Objective Approach
In 1952, when Hosoe entered Tokyo College of Photography, Japanese photography was largely influenced by the coldly objective approach of Ken Domon (1909-1990), one of Japan's pioneering photographers. Hosoe was fortunate in being able to join an avant-garde group, the Democrats, where he came in contact with several artists who were working in diverse media, seeking new forms of expression. During these years, Hosoe and other young Japanese photographers, such as Yashuhiro Ishimoto, were influenced by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where Ishimoto had studied. Thanks to the American Culture Center in Tokyo, Hosoe became acquainted with Edward Weston's Point Lobos photographs. As a result of these various influences, in 1959 Hosoe and several others founded the photo agency VIVO to protest actively against Domon's documentary approach.
Although at first a group effort, it has been Hosoe who has consistently pushed the boundaries of photography and helped establish Japanese photography as a legitimate art form. His special interest in Surrealism has played an essential role in his imaginative imagery. The nude has been an especially significant subject. Working with the 35-mm camera and four-by-five-inch formats, Hosoe has created
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