Eikoh Hosoe (細江 英公) was born in Yonezawa, Yamagata in 1933 and graduated from Tokyo College of Photography in 1951. He exhibited in his first solo show in 1956 and has since established himself as an internationally acclaimed photographer. Hosoe’s figures have a Surrealist quality that is startlingly intimate, yet also render the flesh abstract and strange.
His approach to photography is philosophical, “… To me photography can be simultaneously both a record and a mirror or window of self-expression… The camera is generally assumed to be unable to depict that which is not visible to the eye and yet, the photographer who wields it well can depict what lies unseen in his memory.” Renowned Japanese author, Yukio Mishima wrote of Hosoe’s photographs, “God is dead, and naked human beings face the world shameless and without pride.”
Eikoh Hosoe’s work has been exhibited in such significant institutions as the International Center of Photography and Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Nikon Salon, Tokyo; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Smithsonian, Washington D. C. Published works include: Man and Woman, 1959, Embrace, 1971, The Cosmos of Gaudi, 1986 and Eikoh Hosoe, 1986, among numerous others. He has been a professor of photography at Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics since 1975 teaching various photography workshops worldwide.
