Eikoh Hosoe: Kamaitachi - Hardcover

4.4

43 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 159711121X ISBN 13: 9781597111218

Publisher: Aperture, 2009

An undisputed masterwork among Japanese photobooks, Eikoh Hosoe and Tatsumi Hijikata's "Kamaitachi" was originally released in 1969 as a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Hosoe, the renowned photographer, and Hijikata, the founder of ankoku butoh dance, had visited a farming village in northern Japan, where Hijikata improvised a performance inspired by the legend of a weasel-like demon named Kamaitachi. As Hosoe photographed Hijikata's spontaneous interactions with the landscape and with the people they encountered, the two artists together enacted an intense investigation of tradition and an exploration, both personal and symbolic, of contemporary convulsions in Japanese society. In 2005, Aperture published a limited-edition facsimile in homage to the original, in close consultation with the artist; now, they have made this enchanting body of work available in its first ever affordable trade edition, which was painstakingly reworked by renowned graphic artist Ikko Tanaka--the designer of the original volume--shortly before his death. His reinterpretation of this classic book object, which is truly a paragon of Japanese bookmaking, includes as a special bonus four never-before-published images from the classic Kamaitachi series.
Eikoh Hosoe was born in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, in 1933. He is an integral part of the history of modern Japanese photography, and remains a driving force not only for his own work, but also for his efforts as a teacher and ambassador, fostering artistic exchange between Japan and the outside world. Hosoe lives in Tokyo and is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

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About the Author:

Eikoh Hosoe was born in the Yamagata Prefecture of Japan in 1933. Today he remains one of Japan's most important artists, not only for his own work but also as a teacher and as an ambassador fostering artistic exchange between Japan and the outside world. He is the founder and director of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts and professor of photography at the Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics. Hosoe lives in Tokyo and is represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York.

Donald Keene is a Columbia University Professor Emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature.

Shuzo Takiguchi was a poet and art critic, credited for having introduced Surrealism to Japan at the end of the 1920s.

Review:

"[Kamaitachi is] a spellbinding collection of images, ranging in subject from comedy to tragedy, mystery to eroticism, movement to stillness. The mud, straw, grass and leaves provide a strong sense of the villagers' closeness to nature. There is, too, a powerful sense of drama and of tradition brought before the camera." -- Mark Bentley --Black + White Photography

"...Japanese photography books are not 'just' a collection of images - they are to be seen as a whole, with each individual image being not that important. Looking through Kamaitachi provides a welcome opportunity to see this principle in action; and, of course, there is the added thrill of seeing the work by one of Japan's most important post-war photographers." -- J�rg Colberg --Conscientious blog

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