Shomei TOMATSU 東松照明
(b. 1930, Aichi, Japan, d. 2012)

Tomatsu was a self-taught photographer. In the late 1950s, he participated in the “Eyes of Ten” exhibitions, and, with five of the other participating photographers (Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, Ikko Narahara, Akira Sato, and Akira Tanno), he formed the agency VIVO, which Brueggemann calls the “epicenter” of Japanese photography in the 1960s. Tomatsu’s major projects include photographing the U.S. occupation and subsequent Americanization of Japan; the “Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document,” in which he and Ken Domon photographed the aftermath of the atomic bomb; and pictures of both violence in the streets and the life styles of students in Shinjuku, Tokyo.