Shomei Tomatsu
from Oh! Shinjuku

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Images(3)

Artist Shomei TomatsuJapanese, 1930–2012

CultureJapanese

Titles

from Oh! Shinjuku

Date1969, printed 1980

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 11 1/4 × 16 1/2 in. (28.6 × 41.9 cm)
Sheet: 16 1/16 × 16 1/2 in. (40.8 × 41.9 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund

Object number2014.721

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionEarly in his career, Shōmei Tōmatsu seemed to follow in the tradition of documentary photography. However, by 1960 he had begun to challenge that tradition. In responding to a raging critical debate in the pages of Asahi Camera about the use photography as expression rather than documentation, Tōmatsu insisted, “My photographs are absolutely not photojournalism.” For his first major photographic subject, Tōmatsu focused on Tokyo, where he lived and worked. At first, he had been interested mainly in revealing the city in transformation, as a complex, organic, and mutable system of images and signs. In the latter half of the 1960s, he focused on people in the Shinjuku district of downtown Tokyo: the pedestrians, railway passengers, underground theater performers, and strippers. He also photographed student protestors in the massive and violent protests of October 21, 1969, International Antiwar Day. About eighty of these photographs, shot between 1963 and 1969, constitute his 1969 photobook Oh! Shinjuku, which presents Shinjuku as an assemblage of human desires and power struggles.
ProvenanceArtist; Ms. Yasuko Tomatsu, Japan; Ishiuchi Miyako (dealer), Japan; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, 2014
Exhibition History“For A New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968-1979 Japan,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 8–July 12, 2015.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Inscribed in pencil on verso lower center: 1969 (signature) '80

Signed in pencil verso lower center: Tom

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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