Island Life

Shomei Tomatsu @ AIC

The first museum exhibition on Japanese photographer Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012) since his death, anywhere in the world, and his first solo show in the United States in nearly ten years, Island Life is also the first to concentrate on Tomatsu’s long fascination with Japan’s southern islands. 

In 1969 Tomatsu went to Okinawa, the main island in an archipelago of several hundred islands that stretches across the sea from Japan to Taiwan. Okinawa was then under United States jurisdiction, and few Japanese were permitted entry. Tomatsu eventually moved there for several years, making four books and many more magazine stories on life in the southern or Ryukyu islands. The politically incisive black-and-white photographs he had made in the 1960s—including pictures of American bombers taking off from Okinawa for Vietnam—gave way to seascapes of dazzling color and more everyday scenes. But Tomatsu never stopped making tightly composed and moving photographs, guided by a finely developed sense of light and visual poetry.

The show will remain up in Galleries 188-189 until January 5th.