Background

Shomei Tomatsu was born on January 16, 1930, in Nagoya, Aichi, Japan.

Education

In 1954 Shomei Tomatsu graduated from Aichi University.

Career

Shomei Tomatsu began photographing when he was at Aichi University. After graduation, he moved to Tokyo and worked for Iwanami Shashin Bunko publishing house as a photographer, but he became independent two years later in 1956. His short career in this publisher, however, has deeply impacted the direction of his photography career. In 1959 he established a self-managed photography agency "Vivo", along with Eikoh Hosoe and Kikuji Kawada, devoting themselves to "subjective" documentary photography instead of the classic objective documentary photography. In 1960 Tomatsu began a series on Nagasaki to document its current state for the Japan Council Against A and H bombs. The result was a joint effort with Ken Domon and others, Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document 1961.

His most famous image, Melted Bottle (1961), taken in Nagasaki, is an example of Tomatsu’s movement beyond the unmediated style of other photographers in the immediate post-war period. Tomatsu, instead, employed a highly subjective aesthetic. Tomatsu’s later works captured violent anti-Vietnam War protests and student riots in his "Protest" series from Tokyo in the late 1960s, as well as the emergence of Shinjuku’s radical Bohemian culture in the 1970s.

He had a university teaching career. In 1966 he became a professor at the Tokyo University of Art and Design. In 1966 he published 11:02 Nagasaki, a disturbing collection of images relating the horrific effects of nuclear war. Tomatsu founded his own publishing company, Shaken, in 1967. He was a founder of the avant-garde magazine, Provoke.

His major solo exhibitions include "Traces: Fifty Years of Tomatsu’s Work," Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (1999), "Nagasaki Mandala," Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum (2000), "Okinawa Mandala," Urasoe Art Museum (2002), "Aichi Mandala: Tomatsu Shomei’s Landscape," Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya (2006), "Tomatsu Shomei: Tokyo Mandala," Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2007), "Tomatsu Shomei: Photographs," Nagoya City Art Museum (2011), and "Shomei Tomatsu: Island Life", the Art Institute of Chicago (2014). The exhibition "Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation," which was organized by The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2004, toured various places in America and Europe through 2007.

Achievements

• Shomei Tomatsu is widely considered among the most influential figures in Japanese postwar photography. He influenced the subsequent generation of Japanese photographers, including Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki. Among his major awards are the Japan Photo Critics Association Newcomer’s Award (1958), the Japan Photo Critics Association Artist Award (1961), the Mainichi Art Award (1976), The Minister of Education, Science and Culture’s Art Encouragement Prize (1976), The Medal with Purple Ribbon (1995) and The Photographic Society of Japan Distinguished Contributions Award (2005).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Nagasaki 11:02

    (In 1960, Shomei Tomatsu (1930-2012) was offered the assig...)

    1966
  • Salaam Aleikoum

    (Shomei Tomatsu's extremely scarce documentary photo-essay...)

    1968
  • Après-guerre

    (Photographs by Shomei Tomatsu. Essay (in Japanese and Eng...)

    1971
  • Nihon 1967
  • Shomei Tomatsu: Okinawa 1969
  • I Am A King 1972
  • Visions of Japan: Tomatsu Shomei 1998
  • Sakura 1994

• photography

  • Nagoya Smoking Prostitute

    1958

  • Hibakusha Senji Yamaguchi

    1962

  • An Alibi 1

    1971

  • Untitled

    1958

  • Untitled

    1969

  • Protest 1

    1969

  • Men at window one year after the town was struck by a typhoon

    1954

  • Eiko Oshima

    1961

  • Untitled

    1959

  • Hibakusha Tsuyo Kataoka

    1961

  • Untitled (Yokosuka)

    1959

  • Coca-cola, Tokyo

    1969

Views

Quotations: "A single photograph is a mere fragment of an experience and, simultaneously, the distillation of the entire body of one's experience."

"Photography means releasing oneself from one type of gravity and placing oneself in a space where a different force is trying to move you."

"A photographer looks at everything, which is why he must look from beginning to end. Face the subject head-on, stay fixed, turn the entire body into an eye and face the world."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• John Szarkowski: "Tomatsu is the pivotal figure of recent Japanese photography, his images are an intuitive response to the experience of life itself."

Connections

In 1960 Shomei Tomatsu married Matsuko Inoue. They had a daughter, Izumi. In 1975 the couple divorced. In 1986 he married Yasuko Nakano.

Spouse:

Yasuko Nakano

ex-spouse:

Matsuko Inoue

Daughter:

Izumi Tomatsu

Friend:

Daido Moriyama

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2011