In 1988, Eikoh Hosoe described Kimono as his favorite small series, a project unlike anything he had made before or would make again. The title arrived when the photographer was twenty-nine, prompted by Aya Koda’s novel about a woman’s passage from girlhood through marriage, widowhood, and the resolve to stand alone. Hosoe set his pictures alongside Koda’s prose in a contest of sorts, a young photographer testing what the camera could hold against the finest kimono writing in Japan. For the widow he persuaded Miki Aoyama, a model close to him, to wear mourning dress, an image he wanted even though he could not recall it in the novel.
Nazraeli Press issues the work now as number 45 in One Picture Book Two, a hardcover volume of sixteen pages carrying six duotone plates. Hosoe chose the images and shaped the layout himself; he finalized the printing proofs before his death at ninety-one, and the publisher’s series, with his earlier contribution, framed this installation of a distinct and plainly personal sequence. The abbreviation of the format is exacting; six plates must carry the whole arc of a life’s first half, and Hosoe’s known instinct for myth, symbol, and the body in collaboration — with Yukio Mishima in Barakei, with Tatsumi Hijikata in Kamaitachi — supplies the terms of that compression.
The book belongs to the late reckoning with Hosoe’s place in postwar Japanese art: co-founder of the Vivo agency and the Jazz Film Laboratory, recipient of the Medal with Purple Ribbon, director of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts. Its subject is quieter than his myth-dramas but not slighter. Kimono turns the garment and mourning dress into instruments of a woman’s determination, and it does so within a small, precisely made object rather than a grand suite.
Kimono is limited to five hundred numbered copies. Each includes a 5 x 7 inch original print with Hosoe’s name seal, supplied by his family and stamped on the back of each print. The limited edition and the original print give the book a place among the final projects of a major photographer, and its compact scale, six plates and sixteen pages, sets it apart from his better-known collaborations.
