Eikoh Hosoe — Killed By Roses — Eric Mouchet Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 27 → December 22, 2016

Born in 1933, Eikoh Hosoe spent his childhood in a Japan destroyed by the war. The avant-garde photographers of his generation, torn between nationalist authoritarianism and the opening of an equally seductive vanquishing West, in one way or another, witnessed everything from the collapsing of traditions to the Japanese millennial supremacy.

In 1963, Hosoe created the album “Barakei — Killed by Roses” with Yukio Mishima which put the scandalous author in the spotlight and lifted the photographer to immediate international
notoriety.

In “Barakei”, Mishima, always stripped bare, is alternatively captured in the kitschy gold setting of his home in Tokyo and in Hijikata’s deserted dance studio. The other shots pay tribute to his love for European Renaissance painting, and, in particular his very sensual iconography of the martyr Saint Sebastian.

“Barakei” is an erotic and morbid fable that is well known due to its provocative allusion to Mishima’s homosexuality and the despair of an immensly erudite author who refused the decline of his country and of his body. “Barakei” is incontestably Eikoh Hosoe’s masterpiece.