Man and Woman (Otoko to onna). Photographs by Eikoh Hosoe. Camera Art, Tokyo, 1961. Unpaged. Octavo. Hardbound in graphically illustrated dust jacket. Slipcase Original printed obi (belly band). Gravure reproductions. Original printed translation booklet (often missing), with essay Tatsuo Fukashima; comments by Ken Domon, Shomei Tomatsu and others, poems by Taro Yamamoto.
Included in
Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 1970s by Ivan Vartanian & Ryuichi Kaneko. Hosoe's classic first book! A highpoint in the Japanese photobook canon, and a classic of 60s erotica, included in
Alessandro Bertolotti's Book of Nudes. Dancers' bodies in exuberant and fluid movement, printed in his inimitable high contrast, grainy style. Achieves a pitch-perfect sensual unity of form, flesh, and inky gravure.
Otoko to Onna (Man and Woman) was Hosoe's first collaboration with Tatsumi Hijikata, who was an important figure in 60s avant-garde circles in Japan. In The Photobook: A History, vol. I Parr & Badger write that, "despite its intensely Japanese qualities, the style, dramatic and rhetorical, focuses on the human body in a way alien to the Japanese, where there was no tradition of the nude in an abstract sense, only nakedness."
