IBASHO is pleased to present a concise retrospective solo exhibition ‘SENSEI’ by Eikoh Hosoe in the gallery, on view from 31 October until 20 December 2026.
Eikoh Hosoe (1933–2024) was one of the masters (‘sensei’ in Japanese) of post-war Japanese photography and tutor of Hitoshi Fugo, whose works will also be shown in IBASHO at the same time.
Born Toshihiro Hosoe in Yonezawa, Yamagata Prefecture, he grew up in Tokyo and studied at the Tokyo College of Photography, graduating in 1954. His first solo exhibition, 'An American Girl in Tokyo', followed in 1956. The following year he participated in 'Eyes of Ten', an exhibition that brought together a new generation of Japanese photographers seeking alternatives to the dominant conventions of documentary realism. In 1959, Hosoe joined Shōmei Tōmatsu, Kikuji Kawada, Ikkō Narahara, Akira Satō and Akira Tanno in founding VIVO, an independent photographic agency whose name means ‘life’ in Esperanto. The six photographers shared an office and darkroom while pursuing their own individual practices, helping to establish a more subjective and experimental direction in Japanese photography.
Hosoe’s practice developed through encounters with artists from beyond photography, such as with Yayoi Kusama. His meeting with the butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata in the late 1950s proved particularly important, while his collaboration with the writer Yukio Mishima produced 'Ordeal by Roses' ('Barakei'), one of the most celebrated photographic books of the post-war period. Hosoe also worked in experimental film and continued throughout his career to move between photography, performance, theatre and literature. In 1974 he co-founded the Workshop School of Photography with Shōmei Tōmatsu, Daidō Moriyama and others, and from 1975 taught at the Tokyo College of Photography. He later became professor emeritus and, from 1995, the founding director of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts. His contribution to photography was recognised internationally, including with the British Royal Photographic Society’s 150th Anniversary Medal in 2003 and the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, in 2017.
This commitment to collaboration is central to the four series that will be exhibited. In 'Ordeal by Roses' (1961–62), Hosoe worked with Mishima to construct a sequence of highly staged images in which the writer's body becomes the principal site of eroticism, ritual and mortality. Photographed largely in Mishima's domestic surroundings, the series transforms the familiar into a theatrical and psychologically charged environment. First published as 'Killed by Roses' in 1963, it established a distinctive visual language in which photography operates as a form of performance.
'Kamaitachi' (1965–68) grew from Hosoe's collaboration with Hijikata and from their shared connection to the rural north of Japan. Hijikata appears within the landscapes and villages of Akita as an unsettling, elusive figure, moving between everyday life and the supernatural. The title refers to the 'kamaitachi', a folkloric creature said to attack with sickle-like claws . Hosoe's photographs transform childhood memories of the countryside into a world of myth, movement and disturbance, where Hijikata seems to belong simultaneously to the present and to an older, imagined Japan.
In 'Embrace' (1969–70), Hosoe concentrated on the physical encounter between bodies. Photographed at close range, male and female nudes are fragmented and intertwined until conventional distinctions of portraiture and identity give way to form, texture and rhythm. The body becomes a photographic landscape in its own right, with skin, limbs and gestures reduced to intensely graphic compositions.
'Simmon: A Private Landscape', begun in the early 1970s, follows Simon, a prominent cross-dresser in Tokyo, through a series of intimate portraits and observations. Unlike the deliberately constructed mythology of 'Ordeal by Roses' or 'Kamaitachi', the work develops around an individual presence and the environments through which he moves. Simon becomes inseparable from his surroundings, turning the city into a personal landscape. Although the photographs were made in the 1970s, the series was not published as a book until 2012, revealing a lesser-known but particularly personal dimension of Hosoe's work.
Across these projects, Hosoe repeatedly brought photography into dialogue with other forms of artistic expression, but never subordinated the photograph to them. His images are constructed rather than merely observed, yet their theatricality serves as a means of reaching experiences that ordinary description cannot contain: desire in Mishima's body, memory and folklore in the landscapes of 'Kamaitachi', physical intimacy in 'Embrace', and identity and place in 'Simmon'. His career, from the experimental climate surrounding VIVO to his later work as an educator and museum director, was equally devoted to expanding what photography could be and to creating the conditions in which subsequent generations could do the same.
Vernissage: 31 October from 14:00—18:00
Regular opening hours: Thursday – Sunday, 14:00—18:00, or by appointment
