Eikoh Hosoe, an avant-garde photographer who helped pioneer a new kind of art making in postwar Japan, with surreal and often erotically charged images exploring life, death, sexuality and the menace of the nuclear age, died on Sept. 16 in Tokyo. He was 91.

His death, in a hospital, was caused by an adrenal gland tumor, his son, Kenji, said.

Mr. Hosoe “transcended the conventions of photographic practice,” wrote Yasufumi Nakamori, the editor of a 2021 book, “Eikoh Hosoe: Pioneering Post-1945 Japanese Photography,” in his introductory essay. He “transformed the ways in which we think about photography, and overhauled what it meant to be a professional photographer in post-1945 Japan. Artistically, intellectually, and geographically, he helped free the medium of its insular past.”

“There was no artist like him,” Mr. Nakamori, the vice president of arts and culture at the Asia Society and the director of its museum, added by phone.

Mr. Hosoe’s work was both cinematic and painterly. “Man and Woman,” his second solo show, in 1960, featured nudes he had composed as if they were abstract sculptural objects — still lifes that were gorgeous and graphic. In one image, a man’s muscular arm cradles a woman’s seemingly disembodied head; her eyes are wide and startled.

In the mid-1960s, Mr. Hosoe cast the dancer and choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, a friend, as a mythical creature known as the Kamaitachi, an evil spirit that assumes the form of a weasel with knifelike claws, haunting rice fields and slashing unwary farmers.