Shomei Tomatsu / Nagasaki 11: 02

Photo by Shomei Tomatsu

Shomei Tomatsu

NAGASAKI 11: 02

“Time has passed in the outside world since it stopped for Nagasaki at two minutes past eleven on August the ninth, sixteen years ago but every victim who has died since acts as a link to join that moment with the present. During the last sixteen years, large numbers of people have died in Nagasaki quietly every year. What I saw in Nagasaki was not merely the scars of war, it was a place where the post-war period had never ended. I thought that the term ruins only referred to the devastated forms of cities, but Nagasaki taught me that it could also be applied to human beings.”

Shomei Tomatsu / A Photographer

A PHOTOGRAPHER

by Shomei Tomatsu

"Sometimes a photographer is a passenger, sometimes a person who stays in one place. What he watches changes constantly, but his watching never changes. He doesn't examine like a doctor, defend like a lawyer, analyze like a scholar, support like a priest, make people laugh like a comedian, or intoxicate like a singer. He only watches. This is enough. No, this is all I can do. All a photographer can do is watch. Therefore, a photographer has to watch all the time. He must face the object and make his entire body an eye. A photographer is someone who wagers everything on seeing. This is what a photographer is."

Shomei Tomatsu from The Pencil of the Sun, 1975

Shomei Tomatsu / Three photos

THREE PHOTOS

by Shomei Tomatsu

In his career as a photographer, Shomei Tomatsu has shot many powerful images, documenting post-war Japan. One of his most famous series of photographs was a selection of photos he shot of Nagasaki following the bombing. He charted not only the still present damage to the city itself but through dramatic black and white photographs the scars on the human victims of the bomb.

Fifteen years after the bomb fell, Shomei Tomatsu was asked by the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs to document the city and its inhabitants, Tomatsu took the job despite knowing little about the city or the bombing. The series, entitled “Nagasaki 11:02,” shows the effects of the A-bomb and the ever-lasting imprint it would leave upon Nagasaki. The photographs illustrate the damage both physical and psychological caused to both people and objects and cover a diverse number of areas. The photograph from which the series takes its name is a watch that was dug up 0.7km from the epicenter of the explosion and which stopped at 11:02 a.m on the 9th of August 1945 (the exact moment the bomb fell).

Other photographs include images of the survivors of the bomb known as the “hibakusha” illustrating their extensive scarring to the camera and images of foetal victims, now specimens in jars. His photos continue to show poignant damage at sites around the city such as destroyed statues of angels at Urakami Cathedral. The impact of this project upon him was so powerful that he continued to visit Nagasaki yearly and eventually moved there in 1998. The photographs capture the horror of the blast and its continuing influence over the city and the victims of the bombing.

The most famous image from this collection, strangely given the powerful nature of the images of the victims of the bombing is of a melted bottle. The melted beer bottle is perhaps one of the most surreal photographs from the series and it takes on dreamlike qualities. The photograph, taken at the Atom Bomb Museum, shows a warped and distorted bottle deformed by the heat and radiation and highlights the power and devastating results of the atomic era. These photographs are deeply affecting and one cannot be failed to be moved by the images rendered so starkly in black and white.

Information for this article were taken from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Eye Curious.

http://www.lomography.com/magazine/lifestyle/2012/01/12/shomei-tomatsu-11-02-nagasaki

Shomei Tomatsu / Skin of the Nation

Shomei Tomatsu, Provoke Movement Photographer, Dies at 82

JANUARY 07, 2013

Photographer Shomei Tomatsu, one of Japan's most influential post-war photographers and a prominent figure in the Provoke Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, died December 14 from complications of pneumonia, his London gallerist has confirmed. He was 82 years old.

"We have lost one of the world's truly great photographers. Shomei Tomatsu refused to compromise on every level and was a photographer's photographer," says gallerist Michael Hoppen, who adds that Tomatsu had been fighting cancer for some time. "[He was] brilliant and visionary. His work remains as a living testament to his talent."

Tomatsu, along with photographers Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira and Koji Taki, was part of a movement that rejected the quiet, formal conventions of a previous generation of Japanese photographers for a more radical approach that reflected the influence of American popular culture after World War II.

"We photographers must use our own eyes to grasp fragments of reality far beyond the reach of pre-existing language," Taki wrote in a manifesto for the movement. The result was impressionistic photography that was disorderly and even jarring in style and content, but also poetic. 

In broad terms, Tomatsu's subject was all of post-war Japan, but he focused on the experience of individual people, photographing them in public and private, along with evidence of their presence--often in the form of objects such as shoes abandoned in the streets. He famously photographed a series of objects that survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, such as a watch that stopped at the exact moment of the bombing, stirring a collective memory that had been largely suppressed.

Tomatsu's work was the subject of a 2006 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. SFMOMA  says on its Web site that Tomatsu considered the US occupation of Japan after 1945 "a defining event in his life and his art. He spent years studying the Americans and the spread of their culture into Japanese life." One of his best-known bodies of work, called "Chewing Gum and Chocolate," was a collection of images he shot over a period of several years on the periphery of US Army bases. The series reflected his ambivalence about the US occupation of Japan.

He also photographed bohemian culture for a series he called "Eros, Tokyo," and a series called "Protest, Tokyo," about youth culture of the 1960s. In the 1970s, he published a book called "Pencil of the Sun," a collection of work about a pocket of pre-modern Japanese culture in Okinawa. Later in his career, he turned his camera on Japan's economic boom, while continuing to photograph western cultural influences in his native country.

Tomatsu was born in 1930 in Nagoya, Japan. According to a 2010 story about his work in The Guardian, he was "famously reclusive" and never ventured outside Japan. More about his career, including examples of his work, is available on SFMOMA's Web site.

http://www.pdnonline.com/news/Shomei-Tomatsu-Prov-7264.shtml

GALLERY

Shomei Tomatsu, "Sisters, Tsukudajima, Tokyo," 1955.

Tokyo exhibit at the MoMA. Tomatsu Shomei. Protest, Tokyo. 1969.

Shomei Tomatsu. "Card Game, Zushi, Kanagawa, 1964.

Eros, Tokyo, 1969

Hibakusha (bomb victim) Tsuyo Kataoka, Nagasaki, 1961

Prostitute, Nagoya, 1958

Shomei Tomatsu - Street Entertainers (From the series: Chindon) Tokyo, 1961

Shomei Tomatsu / Boy and the Sea / Tokyo, 1960

1969

Shomei Tomatsu exhibition

Monday, April 5, 2010 

It is interesting to have a look at the Western reception of Japanese photography in the last three decades. After a few initial exhibitions on Japanese photography in the 1970s and early 1980s – like the first and seminal show New Japanese Photography at the MOMA 1974 – the Western audience lost interest in this exceptionally productive period of time and in Japanese photography in generally. It took almost a decade that the interest in Japanese photography revitalized, but this time the interest focussed on contemporary Japanese photographers like Nobuyoshi Araki (first solo show in the West 1992), Hiroshi Sugimoto or Toshio Shibata.

Historical Japanese only came into view again at the end 1990s with the world tour of the Daido Moriyama exhibition, produced 1999 by Sandra Phillips at the SFMOMA, and in 2004 with the exhibition “The History of Japanese Photography” by Anne Tucker at the Museum of Fine Art Houston.Ann Tucker’s catalogue will be the reference publication on Japanese photography for many years to come. This kind of meandering reception of Japanese photography led to the surprising result that “the most important figure in Japanese postwar photography” is still much less known as the photographers who developed their work with or against him. Of course this photographer – who had been labeled the “godfather” of Japanese photography by an artist I met in Tokyo recently – is Shomei Tomatsu.

Recently I had the pleasure to initiate the first solo exhibition of Shomei Tomatsu in Germany, which is currently on show at Galerie Priska Pasquer.

Shomei Tomatsu at Galerie Priska Pasquer Cologne
Exhibition: March 13 – April 17, 2010

Tomatsu’s photographs are examining, in an absolutely personal and unique vision, the changes in the Japanese society since the 1950s. They provide a candid look at the aftereffects of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the influence of American military and popular culture, and the impact of the post-1960s economic boom in Japan. The exhibition will show a selection of works from late 1950s to the early 1970s.

A self-taught photographer, Shomei Tomatsu went freelance in 1956. In the years that followed, he took part in the pioneering “Eyes of Ten” exhibitions and in 1959 he was one of the co-founders of photographic agency VIVO, which is seen as the ‘epicentre’ of Japanese post-war photography. Other VIVO members included Ikko Narahara and Eikoh Hosoe, both of whom were the subject of individual exhibitions by Galerie Priska Pasquer (Eikoh Hosoe in 2002, Ikko Narahara in 2009/2010).

Shomei Tomatsu’s imagery is noted for its varied and complex nature. His style ranges from works leaning towards classical street photography, symbolically charged objects, abstract (urban) views to dynamic, expressive compositions. Depending on the subject matter, the artist constantly expanded his visual grammar,  creating pictures that walk a tightrope between the concrete and the abstract and between fascination and repulsion, while remaining timeless.

A central theme in Tomatsu’s photographic work is the effects of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here, he portrays survivors and documents objects from the Atom Bomb Museum. Among the works featured in the exhibition is “Bottle Melted and Deformed by Atomic Bomb Heat, Radiation, and Fire, Nagasaki, 1961”. This photo, which calls to mind a melted body part, is described by Leon Rubinfien as “possibly the single strongest image of his career” (Shomei Tomatsu:  Skin of a Nation, p. 27).

Another theme that has been explored by Tomatsu for more than a decade is the influence of the US occupying forces and of American culture on Japanese society. The “Chewing Gum and Chocolate” series, which was taken near the US military bases, thrives on the ambivalent experience of the Americans as overbearing victors who also brought a new culture to Japan.

However, Tomatsu’s photography deals not only with the unfamiliar but also with the familiar, such as the tension relating to rural traditions and Japan’s journey to urban modernity since the 1950s. In “Flood and Japanese” (1959), Tomatsu demonstrated the effects of floods, in “Protest” the student demonstrations in Tokyo, and in “The Pencil of the Sun” the dwindling popular culture in Okinawa, the group of islands in the south of Japan.

Brief Biography

Born in Aichi, Nagoya in 1930. 1954-56 Photographer at the Iawanami Shashin Bunko publishing house together with Nagano Shigeichi. Participated in the “Eyes of Ten” exhibitions, 1957-59. In 1959, founded photographic agency VIVO together with Kikuji Kawada, Akira Sato, Akira Tanno, Ikko Narahara and Eikoh Hosoe. In the same year, he began to take photographs at the US military bases all over Japan and also the effects of a typhoon that destroyed his mother’s house. Commissioned to work on a book about the dropping of the atom bomb on Nagasaki, together with Domon Ken. 1972-1976 lived in Okinawa. 1974 Founded the “Workshop Photography School”, Tokyo, together with Nobuyoshi Araki, Masahisa Fukase, Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama and Noriaki Yokosuka. 1995 Awarded the Purple Ribbon Medal by the Japanese government.

Selected exhibitions

1974 New Japanese Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York

1979 Japan: A Self-Portrait., International Center of Photography, New York

1984 Shomei Tomatsu: Japan 1952-1981, Forum Stadtpark, Graz

1985 Black Sun: The Eyes of Four, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

1992 Sakura + Plastics, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1996 Traces: 50 years of Tomatsu’s works, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo

2000 How You Look at It: Photographs of the Twentieth Century, Sprengel Museum Hannover

2004 Interface. Shomei Tomatsu, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto

2006 Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco

2006 Aichi Mandala: Early Works of Tomatsu Shomei, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya

2007 Tokyo Mandala, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo

Selected publications

- Shomei Tomatsu, Ken Domon, et al: Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document. Tokyo 1961

- 11:02 Nagasaki. Tokyo 1966

- Nippon. Tokyo 1967

- Salaam Aleikum. Tokyo 1968

- Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa. Tokyo 1969

- Oh! Shinjuku. Tokyo 1969

- Après-Guerre. Tokyo 1971

- I Am a King. Tokyo 1972

- The Pencil of the Sun. Tokyo 1972

- Kingdom of Mud. Tokyo 1978

- Ruinous Garden. Tokyo 1987

- Sakura, Sakura, Sakura. Osaka 1990

- Tomatsu Shomei 1951-60. Tokyo 2000

- Shomei Tomatsu. Skin of the Nation. San Francisco 2004

photos © Shomei Tomatsu

http://japan-photo.info/blog/2010/04/05/shomei-tomatsu-exhibition/