細江 英公

Eikoh Hosoe is a Japanese photographer and filmmaker known for his experimental photography and dark, high-contrast black-and-white images. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and experimental Japanese theater in the 1950s and 1960s profoundly influenced his work. Hosoe’s focus on the human body is not as erotic as that of Robert Mapplethorpe, but in the context of Japanese society, it was every bit as risqué.

Unfortunately, Hosoe’s images do not display well in this book. The information available in the second and eighth zones of Adams’ zone system require a larger format and better lighting to be appreciated. His high-contrast images are similar to those of Wynn Bullock and Harry Callahan in that respect.… (més)

The short-lived Japanese magazine Provoke, founded in 1968, is nowadays recognized as a major contribution to postwar photography in Japan, featuring the country’s finest representatives of protest photography, vanguard fine art and critical theory in only three issues overall. The magazine's goal was to mirror the complexities of Japanese society and its art world of the 1960s, a decade shaped by the country’s first large-scale student protests. The movement yielded a wave of new books featuring innovative graphic design combined with photography: serialized imagery, gripping text-image combinations, dynamic cropping and the use of provocatively "poor" materials. The writings and images by Provoke's members―critic Koji Taki, poet Takahiko Okada, photographers Takuma Nakahira, Yakata Takanashi and Daido Moriyama―were suffused with the tactics developed by Japanese protest photographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu, who pointed at and criticized the mythologies of modern life. Provoke accompanies the first exhibition ever to be held on the magazine and its creators. Illuminating the various uses of photography in Japan at the time, the catalogue focuses on selected projects undertaken between 1960 and 1975 that offer a strongly interpretative account of currents in Japanese art and society at a moment of historical collapse and renewal.… (més)