Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Eikoh Hosoe: Surrealism and the Specter of Death in the 1980s

Throughout the late twentieth century, Eikoh Hosoe (b. 1933) and Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989) used photography to merge transnational modernisms with cultural and aesthetic aspects of the places where they forged their practices—Japan and the Black Atlantic world. Each worked from a position of postimperial dislocation, using visual and performative strategies to negotiate the trauma of modernity and the persistence of disease. In sharing an array of formal and procedural symmetries, these underexamined artists challenged the boundaries of how photography was understood while also elaborating the expanding boundaries of what is increasingly understood as global Surrealism.