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Eikoh Hosoe
From Virtual Japan
Eikoh Hosoe (細江英公) is a Japanese filmmaker and photographer. He was born on March 18th, 1933 in Yonezawa, Yamagata. He is best known for his post World War II work, focusing on the psychological aspects of war, sex and death.
Biography
He was born as Hiroshi Satoshi in 1933, and moved to Tokyo 3 months after he was born. His cousin told him to call himself Eikoh Hosoe instead, and so he legally changed his name in 1947.
He attended the Tokyo Polytechnic Institute at 19, and graduated with a focus on photography. For a while he worked for women’s magazines. By 1960, he had presented his own gallery titled “Man and Woman” where he won the Japan Photo Film Critics Association Award for New artists.
That same year he begun to work on what would be one of his most famous works, a collaboration with other artists known as the “Jazz Film Laboratory” with Tatsumi Hijikata, Shuji Terayama, and Shōmei Tōmatsu. The purpose of the collaboration was to produce avant-garde works about created various intense pieces of artwork using a wide variety of mediums, including photography, film and paintings.
Hosoe continued to be known for his shocking images, such as photographs of dead women sprawled on the ground, decapitated heads, young women exposing themselves and more. Many of his pieces were in black and white.
In 1994, Hosoe became a professor at the Tokyo Polytechnic Institute. He is currently the curator of Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, and has been since 1995. He also has his own art institute.