EIKOH HOSOE: LUNA ROSSA
Eikoh Hosoe worked on this series of nudes in the summers of 1990-96 while teaching photography workshops in the U.S.in Snowmass, Woodstock and Anchorage. The theme of his workshops was ‘Nudes and the Natural Environment’ and his students participated in the making of these images by being his subjects. In Luna Rossa (Red Moon, a metaphor for the darkroom’s red light bulb), all the photos were solarized in the darkroom. In fact, three darkroom techniques were employed: Solarization (in the style of Man Ray’s Rayograph), photograms (in the style of Moholy Nagy), and photo sketching (in the style of Japanese photographer Ei-Q).
“Hosoe has created ‘light drawings’ that participate in the two reigns: the sun of broad daylight and the red moon of the darkroom..(…) It projects itself onto bodies and landscapes, cutting out circles of milky brightness in such a way that it seems to comes from inside the body or the landscape.”
(From Carole Naggar’s essay).
