organized by Sandra S. Phillips of the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art and by LeoRubinfien
@
The Japan Society
333 East 47th Street
New York
through Jan. 2, then travels to Washington,
San Francisco and Wintherthur, Switzerland
NYTimes - Published:
October 25, 2004
ART REVIEW | SHOMEI TOMATSU
Silent
Lament for a Japan Still Scarred by the War
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
In Shomei Tomatsu's astonishing retrospective at the Japan
Society, a man,
his back to the camera, peers from inside a ship out to
sea. The picture is vaguely
amusing, or it is not, just as it is an obvious metaphor,
or not, depending on how
you choose to look at it. Japan is a country isolated and
protected by the sea at
the same time that the sea, bidden and unbidden, has
carried the world to Japan's
shores.
The man in the photograph, whoever he is, looks as if he
has suddenly noticed
something in the water, something out of the picture
frame, either toward which he
is inclining or from which he is withdrawing - it's
impossible to tell. "The sea," Mr.
Tomatsu once said, "is a phantom mother living deep
inside of me. My sea is not
blue. It is dyed the color of blood. And it envelops me
with the depth of its silence."
This exhibition should come as a revelation to many
people. Japan's pre-eminent
photographer of the postwar era, Mr. Tomatsu is a master
of a kind of redolent
ambiguity that speaks both to his subject, which is life
in Japan, and also to the
nature of photography, which always shows tantalizingly
more than it can explain.
As photographers like William Klein, Garry Winogrand and
Robert Frank defined their
era in America, Mr. Tomatsu has defined his in Japan, but
the work does something
more than that, too.
It is difficult to encapsulate. It is both capricious and
severe. It is about the
aftereffects of war, which can be nearly imperceptible on
the surface but which,
if you look more intently, can be seen to have made a
wreckage of everything,
past and present.
The German writer W. G. Sebald titled a novel after the
rings of Saturn, which look
orderly and elegant from far away but are in reality the
detritus of some immense
catastrophe – shards from an act of violence that continue
to drift endlessly through
time.
Mr. Tomatsu's photographs are, in part, a visual
equivalent: a requiem or lament for
what he perceives as a nation of the walking dead, still
damaged by war, animated
by the corrupting but magnetic influence of
Americanization.
Out of this he somehow manages to achieve beauty, a
dispassionate beauty, which
is art's consolation. He has photographed American G.I.'s
in drag, and a window
curtain lifted by a breeze, a stack of taxis in a
junkyard, and a sticky flytrap in which
the flies form a pattern that is virtually abstract. He
has shot pictures of asphalt
("pictures of nothing," Winogrand admiringly
called them) and an image of a gardener's
boot, a bottle and other flotsam stuck in a swirl of
silvery mud, like mercury, after a
typhoon.
When he photographed the neighborhood of Shinjuku during
the 1960's, it was
Tokyo's newly seedy and bohemian mecca, "the specter
of desire gone wild, which
can swallow everything," in Mr. Tomatsu's phrase.
These are among his most immediate,
freewheeling works, but his images are often best if at
first they don't register - if, as
with the man on the boat, they leave a space between
seeing and knowing, which
history rushes in to fill. The boot in mud was shot in
1959 but at a glance looks as if it
might have belonged to a defeated soldier during the war.
Its eloquence, aside from
the light and composition, derives from this hint of
something larger, which we are
presumed to be able to detect for ourselves.
Declining to preach, the art maintains an attitude of
remote skepticism, which, as
the photographer Leo Rubinfien notes in a remarkably
perceptive essay for the show's
catalog, is how an honest man necessarily regards his
times. From this sane vantage,
Mr. Tomatsu photographs cherry blossoms, and a Chindon, a
street performer with a
powdered face (so close up so that you can count the pores
on his face through the
makeup), and also a young woman in a red kimono posing
before a bright green trash
bin beside an apartment tower.
Stripped of nostalgia, these remnants of traditional life
in Japan, like visual haiku,
imply a vast legacy that these images make clear was never
as ideal as some people
like to imagine, but that is nonetheless more precious now
for being flawed and
disappearing. I said that Mr. Tomatsu is a photographer of
life in Japan, but I might
have said that he is a photographer of the evanescence of
that life.
He was born in Nagoya in 1930, a teenager during the war
who ignored the air-raid
sirens because he wanted to watch B-29's (a "pageant
of light," he said) against the
night sky. Like other cultivated artists of his
generation, he looked back after the war
with contempt at the Japanese military state, but also
disdained the Americanized
establishment that replaced it, and which provided him
with the means and freedom
to express his contempt and disdain. This contradiction
was never lost on him.
It is no surprise that he also became enamored of
Surrealism and French New
Wave cinema. There's something both coldly Surreal and
breezily New Wavish about
photographs like the one of two girls, dancers on a stage,
shot from below at such an
oblique angle that one of them looks as if she is a giant
stepping on an American flag
hanging on a building across the street.
Whimsy mixes with skepticism. Mr. Tomatsu is a skeptic
even about his own
skepticism, which probably explains the passion that seeps
into his most dry-eyed
pictures. When he went to shoot in Okinawa, expecting to
find everything
Americanized, he discovered instead a premodern world just
beyond the military
bases sending their lumbering B-52's to bomb Vietnam.
So he focused his camera on a disappearing Japan, which
reminded him of his
childhood, which he had never loved. What resulted are
luminous and magical
pictures, full of a kind of grave wonder at something suddenly
retrieved from
memory.
He produced his best-known series of photographs during
the early 1960's when
on assignment in Nagasaki to document the aftermath of the
atomic bombing. With
a few exceptions, the pictures ingeniously avoid the easy
device of recording physical
scars and capture something more complex. The city was
rebuilding by then, erasing
its past; like the rest of Japan, it was inattentive to
its victims, who received little
government aid and were ostracized and made to feel
ashamed. Mr. Tomatsu had not
thought much about Nagasaki or the bombings before he
went, which was typical.
What he captured was akin to silence. He chose to
photograph mute relics from the
local atomic bomb museum - a beer bottle melted in the
blast so that it resembled
a deformed fetus, a cracked watch stopped at precisely the
moment the bomb
exploded (11:02 a.m.) and a statue of an angel with its
face knocked off (from
Urakami Cathedral - Nagasaki had the largest Christian
community in Japan). Most
starkly, he photographed a smoky factory at the spot where
the bomb was dropped,
rebuilt against the jagged silhouette of a palm tree that
cleaves the image, like a rip
or scar.
"Sad, haggard facts," Mr. Rubinfien calls these
pictures, which, he adds, "could not
be a dirge, because Nagasaki was being reborn as Tomatsu
worked, but beneath the
surface there was grief so great that any overt expression
of sympathy would be an
insult."
So in the end nothing is simple, Mr. Tomatsu shows, especially
not if the project is
to capture a nation estranged from its past and in love
with its estrangement,
resentful of Americanization, which it has also ecstatically
embraced. How, if you are
clever and thoughtful, do you photograph such things
except with a knowledge that
they are ultimately and essentially beyond the camera's
purview? A camera may get
snippets and fleeting evidence of some larger truths, but
the snippets suggest that
there probably is no national identity in the end, just
fragments.
And yet you may sense from this show that the oblique tone
and refusal to be
pinned down is a statement not just about Japanese
identity but also about life
beyond Japan's shores as well. That man on the boat, it
turns out, was a casualty
of the bombing in Nagasaki, whom Mr. Tomatsu has
photographed before. You
can just see his deformed ear. He is gazing out at the sea
as if sailing into the
future, leaving the echoing past behind him.
The world is stranger and more unfathomable the more
closely you look, Mr.
Tomatsu reminds us.
So look harder.