Shomei Tomatsu, one of the leading post-war Japanese
photographers, he was born in 1930 in Nagoya. He graduated with a degree
in economics in 1954. Tomatsu’s career in photography had started
already during his days as an economics student, when he had his
photographs published by leading Japanese photography magazines. After
his graduation he worked for a while at Iwanami Shoten publishing
agency, before turning to freelance. He was then a part of VIVO
(1957-1961), a photography cooperative, along with two other major
Japanese photographers Ikko Narahara and Eikoh Hosoe. He moved to
Okinawa in the 70s and lived there for almost 30 years, before moving to
Nagasaki at the age of 68, where he continues to reside.
Tomatsu is perhaps best known as for his photographs from the book
Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document 1961 and well as his documentation of Japan
during it’s post-war transformation, like in the series Chewing Gum and
Chocolate and Americanization, these series expressed the positive and
negative influences of the American occupation.
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