It's early Friday evening in a central Tokyo bubble-era building, the spacious foyer is crowded and a man in the back can be observed, smiling warmly and chatting cordially. He has graying hair, wears a dark-blue suit and a pair of the sort of dour, heavy-framed eyeglasses popularized by the late former Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi. While he looks a lot like a typical Japanese senior management type, in reality he is arguably the most revolutionary photographer in this country's history.
Eikoh Hosoe's surprising appearance notwithstanding, at the opening last week for his retrospective "Spiritual Dualism of Photography" at the Tokyo Museum of Photography in Ebisu, I felt honored to meet an artist and visual storyteller whose groundbreaking explorations of sexuality, nationalism and the avant-garde have earned him a respect from his peers that far exceeds the attention afforded him by the media or the market.
The current exhibition, which is showing till Jan. 28, includes a section of saturated color photographs of contemporary butoh performance and, also in color, a series on tile mosaics done in the 1970s and '80s in Barcelona. There are photographs from some of Hosoe's children's books that have never before been presented, and (unfortunately screening on a small monitor) two short video presentations -- "Navel and A-Bomb," which Hosoe made in 1960 in collaboration with his ad hoc avant-garde group, Jazz Film Library, and a documentary on Hosoe himself.