Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation (review)

Idiosyncratic though it is, Tōmatsu Shōmei's work exemplifies a precise moment in postwar photography. Tōmatsu (1930– ) came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s just as the medium was breaking away from its previous obsessions. No longer was photography as overwhelmingly concerned with its relationship to other visual arts as it had been with pictorialism or modernism; nor did photojournalism, so dominant in the late 1930s and 1940s, extend its sway far into the television age. However, photographers in Tōmatsu's pivotal generation had not yet come to adopt the self-referential, nihilist stance of the Provoke era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, let alone the staged and manipulated images indebted to commercial work so common by the 1980s. Instead, in their heyday, this generation tried to balance photography's various potentials, straining to encompass both aesthetic innovation and public engagement, both individual experience and civic concerns, both the subjective and the objective. Advances in technology, particularly in color film, swept through, leaving new possibilities and new conundrums in their wake. The images from this period are often deliberately awkward in their formal composition, because, for Tōmatsu and his contemporaries, honesty required an unaestheticized examination of the postwar world's incongruities. They balance self-expression and public description. Their attitude toward the world is committed but coolly unsentimental. In a word, these images are hip.

Tōmatsu's work is very much of this postwar moment, and yet it is also sui generis. Although he helped found the famous VIVO photo agency in 1959, his style diverges from that of others in this innovative group. He is less interested in the technical experiments that mark the extraordinary career of Narahara Ikkō and more multivalent in mood than Hosoi Eikoh with his implacable, surreal darkness. Although Tōmatsu, like the American photographer William Klein whom he admired, engages society, trying to capture its qualities from the particularity of his own experience, he appears less cynical in his treatment, for instance, of Tokyo in Oh! Shinjuku (1969) than does Klein in his scandal-provoking Life is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels. Though the sex-saturated underworld of Shinjuku may be violent and empty, Tōmatsu does not despise it. Instead, what characterizes Tōmatsu's work here and elsewhere is the avid, almost obsessive, desire to explode postwar complacency and replace its vision of ordered comfort with an appreciation of the spontaneous, terrible, beautiful disorder of life beyond conventional pieties.

Tōmatsu began his career under the auspices of the previous generation's leading photographers, Domon Ken, Kimura Ihee, and Natori Yōnosuke. For Natori's Iwanami Photography Library, he produced a pocket book called Suigai to Nihonjin (Floods and the Japanese, 1954), with images of quotidian items made sensually abstract by the slathering of rich mud coating them (Plate 1). By 1956, however, he had become a freelance artist, breaking with his elders. Indeed, in 1960, in Asahi Camera, Natori attacked Tōmatsu for deserting photojournalism and indulging in an impressionistic and barely legible style. By then, Tōmatsu had found his own way of dealing with public issues. He was beginning to make his mark with famous projects such as the Chewing Gum and Chocolate series dealing with American troops on Japanese soil and the Nagasaki series on the aftermath of the atom bomb. Through these projects, his distrust of conventional aesthetics, his embrace of the harsh sensuality at the edges of modern life, and his unusual conception of a photographic series emerge.

Tōmatsu resists the photojournalist's drive to portray the "whole story"; he makes no pretense of either completeness or narrative. His work on American military bases is a case in point. Rather than penetrate the barbed-wire enclosures that demarcate American power, he explores the raw edges around the bases, the honky...