Killed by Roses (Japanese: 薔薇刑) by Eikoh Hosoe was created primarily between autumn 1961 and spring 1962, in Tokyo, with Yukio Mishima—a celebrated writer and nationalist thinker known for his theatrical persona—as its central subject. Mishima's body—naked, contorted, and often staged with surreal props—becomes both subject and symbol. Hosoe described his aim as photographing life and death themselves, using Mishima's flesh as a medium. The rose, present throughout, embodies this duality: beauty and peril, sensuality and decay. Religious and art historical references, especially to Renaissance works like depictions of Saint Sebastian, underscore the project’s symbolic complexity.
Hosoe's departure from the dominant documentary realism of the Japanese photographic mainstream signaled a shift toward personal and expressive visual languages. His involvement in the avant-garde collective VIVO positioned him at the heart of these changes, collaborating across photography, dance, and literary circles. Visually, the series is distinguished by dramatic black-and-white compositions, high contrast lighting, and fragmented framing. Mishima appears as a spectral figure, surrounded by darkness or layered with classical art imagery. Techniques like solarization, multiple exposure, and axial rotation imbue the images with a dreamlike, sometimes disorienting, atmosphere. The resulting tone is baroque and surreal, echoing the theatrical nature of Butoh dance and Mishima's own performative persona.
Upon release, Killed by Roses received significant acclaim and provoked controversy for its homoerotic imagery. In 1963, the Japan Photo Critics Association awarded the work and named Hosoe Photographer of the Year. It was later included in MoMA’s 1974 "New Japanese Photography" exhibition. Killed by Roses is now widely regarded as significant in the development of Japanese postwar photography, helping redefine the medium as a space for personal expression and artistic experimentation.
