Famed hair nude photographer Kishin Shinoyama dies

Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama has died at the age of 83.

As regular readers will know, Shinoyama is regarded as the king of the hair nude (full-frontal nude), and is largely responsible for establishing it as a publishing genre in the early 1990s with his photo books of Rie Miyazawa (Santa Fe) and Kanoko Higuchi (Water Fruit), though Shinoyama and others had already done nudes in the previous decade (notably, a lovely shoot with Aki Mizusawa).

Others quickly dropped their clothes in front of the camera (not least, Yoko Shimada and Saki Takaoka), hoping to replicate Miyazawa and Higuchi’s success. The hair nude quickly became a high-profile vehicle for relaunching a model’s career. Shinoyama’s photo books made nudity, even full-frontal nudity, respectable and commercially viable.

Known for his trademark frizzy hair, Shinoyama made a whole career out of photographing beautiful famous women, especially nudes. Before his success in the 1990s, he was a regular photographer for weekly and monthly magazines, including Weekly Playboy, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Other subjects along the way included Mitsu Dan, Haruna Yabuki, Saori Hara, Hijiri Kojima, Chiaki Kuriyama, Manami Hashimoto — and Japanese silicone sex dolls.

His non-nude photography includes the famous shot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono kissing, and Yukio Mishima shortly before his death.