Quote / Shomei Tomatsu 55

Tomatsu seems to have liked to work at a distance from the subject, so that it becomes necessary to peer into the picture if it is to be understood. One might in part explain this as diffidence on Tomatsu's part- not wishing to poke his nose into the minutiae of others' lives. Nonetheless , at long range, those lives become all the more fascinating , since this guarantees the authenticity of the pictures. Unaware of the photographer's presence, the subjects would have unselfconsciously given a reliable account of themselves. Manyof these early phtographers therefore invite detailed scrutiny, rewarded by the eventual recognition of all sorts of seemingly extraneous evidence. Paradoxically, this deliberately restrained documentary gives us the fullest possible account of a subject's life. All those apparently superfluous bits and pieces, which we - along with conventional documentarists - usually choose to overlook, in fact constitute the basis of our lives.

Another important aspect of the early pictures is their darkness and the suppression of detail. Darkness is a feature in much of the poetic documentary of the post-war years. It had romantic value as a pointer to melancholy. Light, for which one might read enlightenment, ahd to struggle to overcome the spiritual darkness of the era. But there is little of this metaphysical darkness in Tomatsu's pictures of the mid-1950s. Nonetheless, he liked to deploy shadows. Sometimes almost to the detriment of the picture, obscuring significant physical details. Many of the photographs appear at first to be nothing more than arrangements in chiaroscuro. What lies behind the shadows can only be surmised from the firm evidence available. The act of looking at the picture therefore often turns into a prolonged enquiry, as one works from the known to the unknown. Increasingly, this became Tomatsu's method of ensuring that audiences examined his pictures, a way of inviting them into the scene. If the image involved the human form, it had to be understood by reference to one's won limbs and features. This meant that the photograph was to some degree internalized, subject to what one might call corporeal reflection. Many of Tomatsu's pictures ask to be re-enacted in imagination, to a point where the subject is brought as close as photography will allow.