[1][2] He was professionally and personally affiliated with the writer Yukio Mishima and experimental artists of the 1960s such as the dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, though his work extends to a diversity of subjects.

[3] At this time he also began associating with other young, progressive photographers such as Kikuji Kawada, Shomei Tomatsu, and Ikko Narahara.

"[7] In 1960, Hosoe created the Jazz Film Laboratory (Jazzu Eiga Jikken-shitsu) with Shuji Terayama, Shintaro Ishihara, and others.

[8] Art historian and curator Alexandra Munroe describes that the group was "Anti-tradition, anti-authority, and opposed Social Realism" and "deliberately rejected common sense" and "the conventions of a rigid society.

[7] In the sixties Hosoe traveled abroad yearly, seeing the art of the Fluxus group in New York and of Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona.

[11] Hosoe first met Tatsumi Hijikata in 1958 when the latter's company performed an interpretation of Yukio Mishima's novel Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors), about secret homosexual desire.

[12] Munroe describes the kamaitachi as "a small invisible animal that was believed to attack people in the rice paddies at night.

[14] Kamaitachi was also included a danced component choreographed and performed by Hijikata at Nikon Salon in Tokyo for the photographic exhibition's opening.

[3][16] In these photographs, Hosoe created a series of dark, erotic images centered on the male body with Mishima dramatically posing.

[15] Occasionally featuring other people like Hijikata or the actress Kyoko Enami, these subsequent photos sometime evoke aspects of Mishima's favorite paintings by Botticelli and Giorgione.

[15] In the preface to the published edition, Mishima recounts, "The world to which I was abducted under the spell of his lens was abnormal, warped, sarcastic, grotesque, savage, and promiscuous .

[15] The book was organized into five chapters: Preface, Daily Civilian Life, The Scornful Clock, or the Slothful Witness, Various Blasphemies, and Ordeal by Roses.

[15] According to Hosoe, Mishima had suggested a handful of titles from which Barakei was chosen, including "Death and Loquaciousness," "Passion Variations," "Sketches of Martyrdom.

"[15] Mishima would later say that Hosoe's photographs enabled him to live in "grotesque, barbaric and dissipated" inner world, shot with "a pure undercurrent of lyricism".

[15] Hosoe halted work on the second edition of Killed by Roses, unsure of how it would be received in the immediate aftermath of Mishima's spectacular suicide.

These include Simon Yotsuya, a cross-dressing dollmaker, and Kazuo Ohno, a Butoh dance collaborator with Hijikata who developed his own idiosyncratic style and performed until his death at age 103.

[19] He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003.