In early 2010 I came across a few black & white fine art photography prints done by Eikoh Hosoe in the Aperture magazine. I was hooked by the starkness of the composition, the directness of the approach and yet the artistic mood that avoided the rawness of contemporary Japanese photographers like Araki, the provocativeness of DaidÅ Moriyama’s photographs or the portraiture style of Shomei Tomatsu.
When you take a photo at 1/1000 of a second, the moment can become an eternal fact, an eternal moment. So we have a philosophical problem of objectivity and subjectivity.
Eikoh Hosoe
All the time I was learning and experimenting with my personal approach & style, I kept conceptualizing my own fine art photography projects, I kept going back to Eikoh Hosoe’s fine art series from time to time to get inspiration and ideas.
Almost everything about his numerous series interested me – the ways he defined his series, the balance between obscurity and directness, the contrast between reality and imagination and his use of shadows to highlight the photographic interests.
Some of the best series of Eikoh Hosoe are the Embrace, done predominantly in the 1970s, Man & Woman series done in the 1960s and the Naked School series done in the mid 1970s. The subtlety of composition and the mastery in the use of positive & negative spaces purely through exposure contrasting is breathtaking.
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.
Eikoh Hosoe, 1933
This is a writing in the Opium of Art series.