SHOMEI TOMATSU: THE SKIN OF THE NATION by the agency of LEO RUBINFIEN.

SHOMEI TOMATSU: THE SKIN OF THE NATION

by the agency of LEO RUBINFIEN, SANDRA S. PHILLIPS, & JOHN W DOWER

recent HAVEN & LONDON: SAN FRANCISCO MOMA AND YALE UNIVERSITY PRES 2004/223PP/$45 (HB)

This work is the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition forward Shomei Tomatsu's work organized on Sandra Phillips and Leo Rubinfien for the San Francisco Museum of recent Art. The show, currently at the Japan Society Gallery in novel York (until Jan. 2, 2005) will travel to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC (May 21-August 29 2005) revert to SF MoMA (May 13-August 13 2006) and finally to The Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland (Sept 1-Nov. 12 2006)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Shomei Tomatsu's work embodies the rebirth of Japanese photography after the next to the first World War. Tomatsu was, along with Hosoe Narahara, Akira Sato, and Akira Tanno, a co-founder of the VIVO cooperative agency in 1959 advocating a just discovered trend in Japanese photography, integrating influences of surrealism, "subjective photography", and the recently made known "social landscape" coming from Europe and the US. thoroughly scarred by the war epitomized from the atom bombs dropped in succession Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as according to the occupation of their nation the Japanese were trying to define a just discovered identity, one less insular unless still defined by strong links to their traditions. As seen in the main division Tomatsu's work decidedly breaks away from tradition and clearly establishes Japanese photography in modernity. His photography the two illustrates typical experimental trends in photography in the 1960 as illustrated in Otto Steinert's three Subjektive Fotografie exhibitions, and stands as a forerunner of a contemporary direction recently labeled "conceptual documentary" and illustrated in numerous displays this year in Canada, the US and Europe The Nagasaki 11:02 1945 shoot forward stands as clear example of this latter approach in Tomatsu's work, where the conceptual approach to the result shapes the content of the images and allows the photographer's striking economy of means to be extremely effective.

Leo Rubinfien, the same of the editors of the work and himself a photographer, contextualizes Tomatsu's work in a well-documented essay that introduces 128 pages of photographs. The visible form [i]or[/i] frame of illustrations following Rubinfien's theme has been broken down into ten sub-categories. "Apres-Guerre," "Before," "The Americans," "A-Bomb," "Americanization," "I Am a King," "Underground City." "The South" "The Post-Postwar," and "The Skin of a Nation". These categories sometimes overlap, as they do not pursue a strict chronological order, which makes it sometimes difficult for the reader to master a sense of the evolution of Tomatsu's mode of address The alternation of black and white images with color singles in the last five thematic arranges does not always feel judicious further still manages to maintain the reader's interest. Lastly, it must be pointed revealed that the quality of the printing certainly participates in the experience the reader will live with the main division With one third of its pages dedicated to essays, the caesura to plates, this hard conceal catalog fulfills its role and gives a documented, historical and analytical overview onward one of the key-artists of the history of Japanese photography between 1945 and 2000

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