Eikoh Hosoe Japanese, 1933- Technical discipline, allegory, the tension of opposites, and a lyric sense of design characterize the photographs of Eikoh Hosoe. Fusing the figurative with the abstract, he manipulates cropping, toning, and lighting to create images that are at once intimate and universal meditations. He is recognized for his nude studies, his dark, dramatic portraits of novelist Yukio Mishima, and his powerful, sometimes disturbing images of Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh dance company. Two of Hosoe's most characteristic series, Man and Woman (1960) and Embrace (1971), explore the nude figure as both an elegant abstraction and a charged erotic subject. Often relating to one another as a continuous flow, his images have a sense of theatricality and literary narrative. His collaboration with Hijikata resulted in the series titled Kamaitachi (The Weasel's Sickle, 1969), a photographic drama of madness, jealousy, and superstition derived from symbols of Japanese fables. These photographs won the admiration of Yukio Mishima, who gave Hosoe complete artistic autonomy during their sessions commissioned by Kodansha Publishers (1961-62). The portraits, perhaps Hosoe's most well known, were published first as Killed by Roses (1971) and, in a later variation, Ordeal by Roses (1980). Other publications by Hosoe include Why, Mother, Why? The Tragedy and Triumph of a Little Girl in Poetry and Pictures (1965), Takachan and I (1967), A Dog's Guide to Tokyo (1969), Return to Hiroshima (1970), The Cosmos of Gaudi (1984), A Place Called Hiroshima (1985), and The Human Body (1986). The son of a Shinto priest and his wife (born Toshihiro Hosoe in Yonezawa, Yamagata Prefecture), Hosoe studied at the Tokyo College of Photography (Tokyo Shashin Daigaku, 1951–54) and worked for several years as a freelance photographer and active participant in the vanguard group of artists known as vivo. Among his honors are Photographer of the Year, Japan Photo Critics Association (1963), Art Award, Ministry of Education (1970), Medaille de Vermeil, City of Paris (1982), and the Medal of the City of Arles, France (1983). He has had a retrospective, Eikoh Hosoe: Retrospective, at the Photographers' Gallery, Melbourne (1979), and one-person exhibitions, Eikoh Hosoe: Retrospective with Recent Works, Galerij Paule Pia, Antwerp (1981), and Eikoh Hosoe: Meta, Curatorial Assistance of Pasadena (1992). Since 1975 he has taught photography at the Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics and in 1995 became the director of the Karuizawa Museum of Contemporary Photography. Hosoe lives in Tokyo. A.W.