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Through the 'Greedy Eyes' of Shomei TomatsuThe current exhibition of photographs by Shomei Tomatsu at the Japan Society struck me with an impact so hard, I felt at a loss to comprehend it. Indeed, in the limited number of words allotted here, it is difficult to begin to adequately describe my experience. It is one of those rare shows that evoke inspiration even as it does sorrow. Ultimately, one is left with admiration and hope for humanity, despite the unspeakable horrors and crimes human beings have committed.
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| Untitled (Yokosuka), from the series Chewing Gum and Chocolate, 1966, gelatin silver print.
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Although he is revered in Japan, Tomatsu is little known in the United States. His photos have been included in American photographic exhibitions, but this is his first solo retrospective in this country, and it includes all of his major series. Drawn from the artist's own collection, this large exhibition—titled "Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation"—comprises nearly 260 works that span 50 years.Born in 1930, this Japanese photographer was 15 years old when the United States dropped atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He had not yet begun his photographic career, but was already at a formative age. With the sense of immortality only a teenager possesses, rather than taking cover, the young man actually went out to observe B-29 bombers. He began taking his first photos in 1950, while in college, at that time consciously incorporating ideas from Surrealism as well as others from western photographic traditions.Tomatsu started from what the Japanese call genkokei, which can be literally translated as "the original scene." From the ravaged cities, yakinohara, or burnt plains, his art rises, like the proverbial phoenix. It has literally grown out of the ashes, the artist converting death, ugliness, and the grotesque into shining, transcendent works of beauty. Starting from a point of unimaginable devastation, destruction, and humiliation, Tomatsu set about to rebuild a world in art.The infinitely nuanced photographs can certainly stand on their own. They are immediately accessible aesthetically but, like all great art, their significance becomes greatly enhanced through study and analysis. What an eye this remarkable artist possesses! He himself called his eyes "infamously greedy." (Insatiable, I'd say.) Then there's his powerful imagery, and the history and humanity behind these images.
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| Eiko Oshima, actress in the film Shiiku, 1961, printed 2003, gelatin silver print.
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Dualities abound in his work. From detritus and ruin, he extracts beauty; old vies with new; traditional Japanese values contrast with westernization, Americanization, and modernization. There are love and admiration vs. hatred and fear; modesty vs. smugness; small vs. large; abstraction vs. representation.You cannot pigeonhole Tomatsu. He is not a photojournalist, and has, in fact, undergone criticism from those who complained that his enigmatic photos did not tell a story. He is neither a formalist nor a propagandist, but his pictures contain elements of both. Of course it is impossible to look at pictures of devastation from the atom bombs without intense emotion, and Tomatsu knows this. So, rather than clobber us over the head with images conveying obvious anti-war rhetoric, Tomatsu captures the essence of things through the use of metaphor: a helmet, with a fragment of a skull still stuck inside it; a bottle melted and deformed by heat from the bomb, closely resembling some grotesque, aborted, mutilated fetus; a 35-year-old, once-beautiful woman, whose face turned to jelly during the atom bomb attack in Nagasaki; a damaged wristwatch, stopped at 11:02, August 9, 1945 (when the bomb hit Nagasaki), looking like something out of Salvador Dali.On the other hand, there are the simple delights of a red curtain blowing in front of a latticed window screen (Plate 82 in the exhibition catalogue), or an untitled photo of four extended arms, two of them draped in Japanese traditional patterned sleeves, against a seascape (Plate 79), both of these from the evocatively titled series, The Pencil of the Sun. A lone cloud is captured hovering over a luminous expanse of water; a Kabuki stagehand kneels, the shape of his strange, black-garbed silhouette stark against the infinite background (Plate 111).
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| Untitled, from the series Disabled Veterans, Nagoya, 1952, printed 2003, gelatin silver print.
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In numerous photos, Tomatsu brilliantly captured the contradictory feelings of attraction and repulsion the Japanese experienced toward the American occupiers after the war. This is evidenced in his many shots of grotesque and sometimes savage-looking marines and sailors. Most of them (in the series titled Chewing Gum and Chocolate) threaten and gawk, exuding the ugliness and insensitivity exhibited during occupation. ("We were starving, and they threw us chocolate and chewing gum.") The condescension, alienation, and concomitant humiliation are self-evident. But there is always the other side too: the admiration for the strength of the large, muscular marines; the desire for the life behind the wire of the barricaded American occupiers that Japanese could only glimpse from outside. There is even evidence of empathy. Witness the photo (Plate 24) of the nearly broke sailors searching their wallets for money; or the perceptive shot of an American army man and his wife, in western coats, carrying suitcase and purse, framed against a backdrop of forlorn, uniform, low, wooden Japanese architecture. They appear alienated, far from home, somehow innocent victims of their own country's aggression.Although the consequences of the dropping of the atom bomb in Japan and the history of the aftermath of the Second World War are well known, they are often forgotten in the face of the subsequent economic recovery and might of the Japanese nation. Tomatsu's photographs remind us of this history, and bring it to life. By focusing his lens on unexpected angles of familiar scenes, he enables the viewer to experience both tragedy and beauty as if for the first time. Of course, the real power of the show comes from the fact that these photos transcend specific times and places, and rise to the level of universality. One cannot ask more of any artist."Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation" runs through January 2, 2005, at the Japan Society, located at 333 East 47th Street. It is open Tuesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and on Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.Art historian Greta Berman has been on the liberal arts faculty since 1979.
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