Introduction to Eikoh Hosoe

Yukio Mishima

Introduction to Eikoh Hosoe

Yukio Mishima

One day, Eikoh Hosoe came and took my body away to a mysterious world. I had seen magical works produced by cameras before, but Mr Hosoe's work was more in the nature of mechanical magic than witchcraft, an extremely anti-civilised use of this civilised precision machine. The world to which I had been transported by the magic of his lens was abnormal, distorted, mocking, grotesque, barbaric, and universal, and yet it was a world in which the limpid undercurrents of lyricism murmured in an invisible culvert.

In other words, it is the opposite of the world we live in, a world in which we respect worldly appearances, are concerned with public morality and health, and therefore have ugly, filthy sewers swirling beneath our feet. The place where he abducted me, contrary to where I lived, was a city that was naked, ludicrous, gruesome, cruel, over-decorated, and dazzlingly bizarre, yet its underpasses were endlessly filled with the crystal-clear waters of a lyric.

Yes. I was taken to a strange city. A city not on any map of any country, terrifyingly quiet, a city where death and Eros play at will in the broad daylight. We stayed in that city from the autumn of 1961 to the summer of 1962.

In front of Mr Hosoe's camera, I found that my spirit and mind were not needed in the slightest. It was an exhilarating experience, a situation I had always longed for. Just as a novelist uses words and a composer uses sound, he uses the camera as a medium to create various combinations of the situations in which his subjects are placed, and the light and shadow that make these combinations possible. In other words, the words he used and the sounds he used were the body. Extrapolating the various meanings of the object and throwing them into a meaningless arrangement, and this meaningless mutual reflection restores a certain order of light and shadow. It is only then that the abstractness of the constituent elements of the work, such as words and sounds, is acquired, but in order to do so, as a prerequisite, the object must first have a meaning to be stripped away. The model must therefore be an eccentric novelist and the background must be Renaissance painting or Western Baroque furniture. It is therefore not a procedure of satire or parody, but one of abstraction in his own way. The use of Giorgione's 'Sleeping Venus' or Botticelli's 'The Birth of Venus' is not unlike Dalí's paranoid parody of 'The Evening Bell.' For the photographer, like artists of other genres, to create a work as a substitute for his own spirit, he must first begin with a procedure of abstraction, thus substituting existing abstract components such as words and sounds. We must begin with the procedure of abstraction. Therefore, a clear definition of the subject's outer surface is made for the first time, and a situation is set up in which the model's eyes can be the eyes and the model's back can be the back. In front of his camera, I was thus naturally trained to stare into the camera lens and to turn my back completely to the camera, both of which have the same meaning. If the flesh of my back and my retinas are both my exteriors, what does it mean for me to see?

But I was not alone in not believing my own eyes! It was the photographer himself. Looking through his viewfinder, he was obviously waiting for the subject and the transformation that would take place around it. His consistent task was to precisely calculate and prepare for a situation in which his eyes would be completely betrayed, in other words, to calculate and prepare for a situation in which he would be able to successfully return to the primordial image that his subconscious had already seen. The subject is then determined, fixed, sometimes literally bound, and dedicated, together with the photographer, to an indeterminate transfiguration that occurs at the end of a carefully constructed ritual situation. Sometimes it happened, sometimes it did not. And I, on the other hand, was in a world of objects in which staring and contemplation, rejection and acceptance, had exactly the same meaning.

Photography, I believe, is destined to choose between documentary and testimony before it can be established as art. No matter what special lens is used, no matter how much the subject is distorted by it, the camera knows no other way than to describe everything directly, so that no matter how abstract the composition. The meaning of the depicted object remains there and is deposited there. Photographers filter this out by alternative methods to create works of art.

The photographer strains this in two ways to create a work of art, and the way in which he chooses to strain the two is, in essence, documentary or testimonial. The masterpieces of photojournalism belong to the former category, where the image the photographer has taken from reality, whether it is an incident or a heartbreaking human reaction, takes on an objective authenticity that the photographer himself cannot touch, and the meaning of the object is purified to become the subject of the work. Thus, the nature of the image as a record of the work of art.

When choosing, the form of the work is the absolute authenticity of the objects depicted, and the refinement of its meaning is the subject of the work.

On the contrary, when the photograph chooses testimoniality, the meaning of the object described directly by the camera is filtered, partly lost, partly distorted and acclimatised so that it becomes the form of the work. And no matter what the subject of the work is, the photographer expresses it with a subjective judgment.

--This is true.

-- This is a photograph, so as you can see, there is no lie.

The art of Eikoh Hosoe is the epitome of this testimonial quality, and the previous definition can be applied to the following concrete illustrations.

Suppose there is a rose. The rose has a particular meaning, including the general concept of rose that most people around the world have in their minds, but also its place of origin, type, form, and colour, and the camera lens directly describes the rose in terms of these meanings. And what is distorted and played with in the course of the testimonial filtering process is not actually the image of the rose, but only the meaning of the rose. In a photograph with a documentary character, this meaning should be the subject of the work, but in a photograph with a testimonial character, the meaning of the rose is transformed and acclimatised to become a form. In other words, it begins to be "the rose as palace architecture," "the elephant-like rose," "the womb-like rose," "the yang-object rose," and so on. However, the elephant and the womb are not the subject of the work, but the form. The subject matter is only ever toyed with in testimonies such as the following by Hosoe.

--This is a real rose.

--This is a real rose, this is a photograph, and as you can see, there are no lies.

Here is the discovery of the pathetic lyricism behind all the bogus psychic photography and decapitated Shunga photographs, and its extreme heightened form, suggesting that the bizarre and uncanny lyricism of photographic art can only come to life through the refrain of the cry -- "This is a real ghost - this is a photograph, you see, and there is no lie in it." This cry, this testimony, is his own confession. And can not the photographer's confession be made only through this uniform testimony of a thousand verses?

So these works are shivering with the faint but intense tremolo of a testimony that can never have any objective credibility. Why don't you believe me? This is a photograph, why don't you believe it? How could the photographers of those red-fabric-lined, boxy machines have foreseen that photography, the product of a mechanical civilisation, the king of all-round realism, the king that has overtaken realist painting, would be used for such paradoxical testimony when it happened right in front of my eyes? The solitude of these works, each based on the same testimony told in a different tone, I have no hesitation in calling it a photographic poem. He witnessed with his own eyes the unheard of transfiguration and testified to it.

Next, as I may add an extra explanation, these things certainly happened in reality.

Synopsis: This collection of works begins with the first chapter, the overture, which preliminarily presents many variations on a consistent theme.

In Chapter 2: Civic Everyday Life, we are told of the daily life eccentricities of a truly solid, good and average citizen. But who can laugh at this madness? As Molière so wisely put it, "every man is a madman when he is alone." Standing stupefied with a collar around his naked neck and a rose tie inserted into it, or falling onto a marble mosaic strip with a rubber hose wrapped around his body. This is a ritual that every solid citizen performs in secret for a few seconds during a twenty-four hour period on a particular day of the week. Without exception!

In Chapter 3: The Smirking Clock or Lazy Witness, the model is forced to turn around and become an intellectual and a witness. He first acquires the right to ridicule human life in general by standing on a toy chair with a large pillar clock and a tennis ball. He becomes a mere spectator to watch for the eternal time of the clock, which never moves, and is tormented by the high-pitched mockery of himself that echoes on the ceiling and by the pain he feels all the while, and is made to witness the most extreme exposure of human pleasure and suffering. But he merely watches and does nothing. This punishment will eventually come, but before it does, he is temporarily released into a world of transformation at his will.

Chapter 4: Various profane sacrilege. He falls into the old aesthetic of the sacred and the sensual, kicks it to the ground, is born from it like a foetus, is buried here like a corpse, and soon the play of sacrilege has made his flesh transparent.

The play of the profane has thrown him into an illusion. He thinks he has become the wind, as if he can now pass freely through all aesthetic forms beyond time and space, moving from one existence to another, from one life to another, free of any civic responsibility. However, at the end of such joy,

Chapter 5: The agony of the slow execution of the ordeal of roses awaits. Here the symbol of the rose with its cruel thorns comes to the fore, and torture and endless slow death are prepared. And with death and the ascension into the dark sun, the collection comes to a close.

Introduction to Eikoh Hosoe First appearance > Eikoh Hosoe's photobook "Rosei", Shueisha, March 1963

<First publication> "My Itinerant Age" Kodansha, April 1963