Literature

"In his first book, Man and Woman (1961), Hosoe sequenced his photographs as a performance. At the start the models wore black leotards like dancers and they used fish, fruit and flowers as props. The gravure printing intensified the high contrast of the black and white imagery. As the sequence progressed, the bodies became more abstracted to reveal the curve of a breast, the line of an arm, or the shape of an oiled back. A woman's head appeared beneath the arm of a man, as if detached, in a gesture that only dance could have generated. The duality between male and female, between white and dark shapes, moved to a final, minimal form at the point of two touching breasts and the suggestion of inevitable human fusion. The essential contrast was between the female breast and the classical male torso, photographed like a fragment of an Apollonian figure. The sequence creates a pattern of restructuring and symbolic, biological healing. Hosoe was not examining the body in isolated, iconographic postures, but in active union."

- Excerpt from Beyond Japan by Mark Holborn, 1991