The photography of Shomei Tomatsu (1930-2012) offers an acute and subtle gaze on more than six decades of Japan’s life and history.

Working in both black and white and colour, over the course of his career Tomatsu built up a vast corpus of images in which he expressed an aesthetic imbued with a realist element but one also characterized on occasion by visual innovations and experiments. From the outset, subjects relating to society can undoubtedly be considered particularly important in his oeuvre, but his approach to them avoids emphatic, one-sided statements and rather moves in intermediary zones. Using the two techniques of posed and instantly captured images, Tomatsu set out to chart —albeit not with an all-encompassing intent— the life of the Japanese people in relation to both the harsh postwar period and the military presence of American troops, as well as the student protests and uprisings of the late 1960s.

Worthy of separate mention is the personal and professional relationship that he maintained with Okinawa, the largest of the Ryukyu Islands of southern Japan, which he first visited in 1969. Tomatsu regularly returned to the islands over the following decades, attracted by a population that maintained its traditions and customs and which resolutely defended its way of life and spiritual freedom.

This book include photographs loaned from different Japanese institutions and prívate collections, offering a chronological and thematic survey of an intense creative career and one that is required knowledge for an understanding of the social transformations of a country that has played a key role in conflicts in the region of Asia as well as in a global context since the second half of the twentieth century.