Oh! Shinjuku
Artist
Shōmei Tōmatsu
(Japanese, 1930–2012)
Date1969
MediumFirst-edition book
Dimensions7 3/8 × 10 1/4 × 3/8 inches (18.7 × 26 × 1 cm)
ClassificationsPublications
Credit LineAcquired with funds from the bequest of Louise C. Stetter, in memory of W. Cornell Dechert, Class of 1928
Terms
- Publications
- Japanese
Object number2024.009
Label CopyA key figure in Japanese photography, Shōmei Tōmatsu made postwar social and psychological upheavals his subject. His influence on and mentorship of the younger photographers associated with Provoke, including Daido Moriyama, is manifest in the pages of that galvanizing Japanese publication from the 1960s.Like those of the Provoke group, Tōmatsu’s images are often unsettling, revealing an unflinching and expressionistic approach to his subjects. Here, we see a young woman’s neck from above and her face from below, as though the photographer were on top of her. Her pose and the camera angle suggest a sexual encounter, but there is little in the image to titillate. Her face is like a mask; her features protruding like abstract shapes; her body below the neck is out of frame.
Tōmatsu chose this image for the cover of his 1969 book Oh! Shinjuku. As for many twentieth-century Japanese photographers, photobooks were of paramount importance to Tōmatsu, so much so that he founded his own publishing company, Shaken, to produce them.
Through exquisite gravure printing and careful layout and sequencing, Oh! Shinjuku presents Tōmatsu’s vision of Shinjuku, Tokyo—the epicenter of Japanese youth culture, hedonism, and political action—as a place teetering on the edge of spectacular collapse.
—Kate Addleman-Frankel, the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography
