japanese photographer shomei. tomatsu dies.

Wish the nuke melted Coke bottle from Nagasaki had been used as  the  iconc image to represent him. 

Coca-cola, Tokyo, 1969 © Shomei Tomatsu.

Shomei Tomatsu, one of the most influential Japanese photographers of his era, died on 14 December. He was 82

Shomei Tomatsu, born on 16 January 1930 and whose work is currently on show at the Barbican in London as part of the exhibition Everything Was Moving: Photography for the 60s and 70s, is known for his iconic photograph of a melted bottle taken in Nagasaki in 1961, as part of a magazine assignment to portray the devastation and reconstruction of the city. But it's his non-documentary approach to photography, with his dream-like aesthetics, that made Tomatsu one of the most influential Japanese photographers of his time.

"At the root of much avant-garde art is an attitude to shock the middle classes, and cutting-edge art in 1960s Japan, including photography, incorporated a whole raft of protest issues - anti-capitalism, certainly, but also concerns for national identity and a natural resentment of the Bomb. At the heart of this dissidence was an almost schizophrenic, love-hate relationship with the USA and American culture."

Tomatsu's career in the 1960s and 1970s reflects these concerns perfectly, says Badger. "His aesthetic approach is typical of much Japanese photography of the period, documenting nothing head-on, but always in a sly and poetic manner, such as the melted glass bottles that so memorably connote what the atomic bomb did to human flesh at Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"Politically active, Tomatsu protested through his images, and he helped the student and union protestors with photographic technique, so they could make their own viable document of the protest movement itself."

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2234262/japanese-photography-legend-shomei-tomatsu-has-died