In the 1990s, Hosoe photographed a performance in which ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) images were projected onto Ohno’s body, a technique that he used again ten years later for Ukiyo-e projections. Hosoe perceives Butoh as a modern form of ukiyo-e and for this series he created a “photographic theatre”, projecting a mixture of his own photographs and erotic ukiyo-e images on to a group of Butoh dancers. This term “photographic theatre” could be applied to Hosoe’s oeuvre as a whole: by photographing at the crossroads of different art forms including theatre, dance, documentary and traditional wood-block prints, he has created a theatre in which he manipulates time and space to bring memory to life.

For this large-format, small edition book, lavishly produced with traditional Japanese paper and binding, I wrote poetry associated with Hosoe’s Ukiyo-e series.

In English, French, Japanese.