Shomei Tomatsu

Shomei Tomatsu
Taiyo no Enpitsu (The Pencil of the Sun), 1975
2116

Man fishing on cover with great photos out of the ordinary for Tomatsu.

Price Upon Request

Shomei Tomatsu
I am a king, 1972
2115

9 3/8 x 8 1/4 in. (24 x 21 cm)

Tokyo: Shashin Hyouronsha.



Numerous black-and-white and color reproductions throughout. Original stiff wrappers in photo-illustrated dust jacket. Printed cardboard slipcase.



In 1972, at the age of forty-two and already established as one of Japan's most important photographers, Tomatsu moved to Okinawa. I am a King is his magnum opus of this period. The book gathers portraits of politicians, roadside scenes, 1960's era protests, images of industrial detritus, and the urban skyline. A persistent theme is the Americanization of post WWII Japan and the upheaval it wrought on traditional Japanese culture.

I Am a King has, at its center, a section produced at the height of the student protests, in 1969–70, and in this section he pairs photographs with a month’s worth of his own diary entries. The fact that the text is his own, places Tomatsu’s book far from the Japanese photobooks of the prewar period, in which photographers’ efforts were often framed with essays or statements by hired critics. The book is typical of Tomatsu’s oeuvre, in that it magnifies documentary photography through the use of montage, abstraction, and the mixing of color and black-and-white images.

Price Upon Request

Shomei Tomatsu
Ken, 1970-1971
2113

Ken was published by Shaken, a company established by the photographer Tomatsu Shomei, who provided the cover photograph for the first issue. Each of the three issues that appeared before the magazine ceased publication was edited by a different photographer: Sawano Yoshio, Naito Masatoshi, and Kimura Tsunehisa. The first issue contained criticism of the Osaka World Exposition and cultural criticism related to photography. Contributors included Taki Koji, Moriyama Daido, Nakahira Takuma, and Araki Nobuyoshi.

Price Upon Request

Shomei Tomatsu
Oh Shinjuku., 1969
1931

Paperback with illustrated cover. 120 black and white photographs with the text by Shomei Tomatsu at the end of the publication. That this publication appeared at the same time as the second issue of Provoke is no coincidence. The photographer's exploration of the Shinjuku district focuses on similar subject matter, namely sex, drugs and underground lifestyles. Nevertheless, Tomatsu's work contrasts with that of Morriyama or Nakahira in its clarity and precision.

Price Upon Request

Shomei Tomatsu
Okinawa, Okinawa. Okinawa., 1969
2102

Oblong 4to, recased; photo-pictorial wrappers over boards, edgewear.Tokyo: Shaken First Edition. Oblong quarto. Illustrated with reproductions of the photographer's politically-charged images. Tomatsu's most political book, with the famous, searing image of a missile launching sandwiched between graphic slogans demanding the end to American occupation of the island. Like most of Tomatsu's books, Okinawa is difficult to categorize. It borrows stylistically from the Provoke school while never losing its focus as a social documentary, yet it would be overly simplistic to lump it in with other Japanese protest books, even those about Okinawa.

Price Upon Request

Shomei Tomatsu
OO! Shinjuku, 1969
1751

10 1/8 x 7 1/4 in. (26 x 18.6 cm)

Tokyo: Shaken.



120 black-and-white photographic illustrations. Original photo-illustrated wrappers, with text by Tomatsu printed on the back cover.



Despite the economic upturn of the 1960s, which established Japan as the third-largest economic power in the world, a fundamental opposition developed against the new political, economic, and cultural structures that had emerged in the post-war period in Japan. In 1968, the resistance manifested itself once again in university student protests against the pending extension of the “ANPO” security pact and the Vietnam War. This phase of the upheaval and alienation is documented by Tomatsu in his photo book OO! Shinjuku. A resident of the Shinjuku commercial and government district of Tokyo, he photographed the lives of the young generation and the student protests, which began in Shinjuku. Tomatsu's photographic sequences of anti-Vietnam protesters, strip clubs, and dark back alleys capture the chaos of Shinjuku in the late sixties, and illustrate the district’s central position in the mythology of postwar Japanese counter-culture.

[Ref. Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, vol.I, p. 290]

Price Upon Request

Shomei Tomatsu
OO! Shinjuku, 1969
2114

7 3/8 x 10 1/8 in. (19 x 26 cm)

Paperback with illustrated cover. 120 black and white photographs with the text by Shomei Tomatsu at the end of the publication. It is no coincidence that this publication appeared at the same time as the second issue of Provoke is no coincidence. The photographer's exploration of the Shinjuku gay district focuses on similar subject matter, namely sex, drugs and underground lifestyles. Tomatsu's work contrasts with that of Morriyama or Nakahira in its clarity and precision.

Price Upon Request

Shomei Tomatsu
Nippon (Japan), 1967
2112

8 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. (21.9 x 19.1 cm)

Tokyo: Shaken.

Illustrated with 150 black-and-white photographs by Shomei Tomatsu, printed in monotone gravure. Original silver cloth with title debossed on cover and stamped in black on spine. With publisher's clear plastic jacket.



Nippon was the first publication of Tomatsu's own publishing company Shaken. The images collected in the book were originally designed to make up three separate photobooks: “11:02” Nagasaki, Osorezan: Countryside Politicians, Homes, and Asphalt and Occupation. Due to the collapse of the intended publisher, the separate projects remained unrealized until Tomatsu formed Shaken.



In Nippon, Tomatsu addresses the conundrum of Japanese postwar national identity. Most of the photos which make up this book were shot on assignment in various parts of the country between 1955 and 1967, and cover a broad range of topics concerning Japanese life. Tomatsu himself notes in a text at the back of the book, that while many of the photographs were published previously or exhibited (his work was being serialized in numerous photography periodicals during the late 1960s), in editing Nippon he was able to “recompose” the photographs, changing titles and themes. None of the book’s texts address the photographs directly, and instead follow more broad thematic routes. This re-editing of the photographs and their grouped themes, forms a parallel to the postwar restructuring that altered Japan's view of itself after the occupation.



[Ref. Ryuichi Kaneko & Ivan Vartanian, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s, pp. 94-101]

Price Upon Request

Shomei Tomatsu
Nagasaki 11:02, 1966
2142

Illustrated with reproductions of Tomatsu's photographs of Nagasaki after the atomic bomb. 4to, photo-pictorial boards, the spine shows darkening, else near fine, in the publisher's printed slipcase which has a small dampstain. Parr/Badger I 276; Hasselblad 226. The first book by this founding member of the Vivo group with Hosoe, Ikko and others. In 1961 Tomatsu worked with Ken Domon on the Hiroshima-Nagasaki document; this book is his subjective document, titled after the time of the atomic explosion. Tomatsu's influence has been of great importance in the development of modern Japanese photography. Signed by the photographer with his chopmark on the colophon.

Price Upon Request