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31/8/2006

Two exhibitions

Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur

Shomei Tomatsu
"Skin of the Nation"

"Skin of the Nation" focuses on the surfaces, faces, clothes and territories that, like a map, provide information about Japan's mood and sensitivities. Shomei Tomatsu, who was born in 1930 and grew up during the military regime in World War II, belongs to the "faithless" generation, as he himself has formulated it - to the generation that experienced the shock of Japan's change from a closed into an open society. His first photographs taken in the 1950s were dedicated to poverty-stricken life in post-war Japan, to wounded soldiers, potters, farmers struck by floods, school children and students from the poor social classes. At the end of the 1950s, he founded the "Vivo" photo agency with Kikuji Kawada, Eikoh Hosoe and others. During the 1960s he was regarded as the most important and influential post-war photographer. His friends in other media were the film-maker Nagisa Oshima, the theatre director Shuji Terayama, the Butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata and the writer Kobo Abe.

This major retrospective represents the first comprehensive overview of the work of Shomei Tomatsu and bears witness to his status within the Japanese post-war avant-garde and his role in the development of modern Japanese photography. With approximately 260 photographs, the exhibition shows all Tomatsu's major groups of works, for example "Nagasaki 11.02" - the shattering essay on the effects of the atom bomb and the lives of the survivors - and "Chewing Gum and Chocolate", his first attempt at capturing the far-reaching Americanisation in Japan after the war - with the huge dichotomy between the military threat and the cultural attraction, the seduction of Hollywood glamour. Shomei Tomatsu takes us from traditional Japan to the Japan of economic success and shows the effects of these economic, political and cultural changes. His approach, his documentary-based, lyrical and symbolic way of seeing things influenced generations of Japanese photographers. The father of modern Japanese photography, he influenced Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama just as much as, later on, Seiichi Furuya, Takashi Homma and Yoshiko Seino - all of them photographers whose work has been shown in the Fotomuseum Winterthur and who are now represented in the museum's collection.

The exhibition was created by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Japan Society, New York. The curators are Sandra S. Phillips and Leon Rubinfien.

With the support of the Vontobel Foundation, Zurich

Publication on the exhibition:
Shomei Tomatsu - Skin ot the Nation. Published by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with Yale University Press, New Haven and London. With texts by Leo Rubinfien, Sandra S. Phillips and John W. Dower, Preface by Daido Moriyama. 224 pages, 131 Duplex- and 28 colour illustrations, format 24 x 26,5 cm, hardcover with dust jacket. Exhibition price: CHF 59.-

Symposium:
Friday, 27 October, 6 p.m. till midnight: "Japanese Night", the evening symposium on Japanese photography and lifestyle from the past 50 years. More under: http://www.fotomuseum.ch/VERANSTALTUNGEN.30.0.html

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"Stories, Histories"
Set 3 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur

With the artists:
Dennis Adams | Lewis Baltz | Lee Friedlander | Paul Graham | Andreas Gursky | Takashi Homma | Zbigniew Libera | Re'my Markowitsch | Boris Mikhailov | Gilles Peress | Allan Sekula | Bruno Serralongue | Fazal Sheikh | Joel Sternfeld | Bertien van Manen | Lidwien van de Ven | Stephen Wilks

There is much talk of a crisis in photojournalism resulting from the drop in subjective, personal photo essays in magazines and the dominance of television with its ability to provide information rapidly. This forces narrative, in-depth documentary photography to search for new directions in order to make up for the loss of outlets for publication and to be able to assert its own authorship in new and other media, and with different financing. In addition, in recent years a noticeable shift has taken place that embeds the photographic document in other contexts: on the one hand in advertising and fashion (because a nearness to reality was sought in these fields), and on the other hand in art to enable the photographic document to become detached from current events and their speedy distribution and be presented in books and exhibitions with a distinctly slower rate of perception and a conceptual approach. The photographer-authors presented in the exhibition "Set 3" are in this sense no longer classic photojournalists. They do not work for newspapers or magazines, nor do they search for iconic images of individuals that mutate today into classics at auctions. It is much more the case that some of them have developed an approach to narrative photography that enables them to elude the pressures of usability-oriented marketing in magazines and newspapers. With the loss of traditional outlets of distribution for photography in recent years, it is worthwhile considering what conclusions and inferences can be drawn for future methods for producing and distributing documentary photography.

Artists and photographers who are active today, such as Takashi Homma, Stephen Wilks and Andreas Gurksy turn to other methods and approaches that were already being practised in the 1970s and 1980s by such well-known figures as Lee Friedlander, Joel Sternfeld and Lewis Baltz. With a socially motivated eye, conceptual tools and a feeling for the unpredictable, these photographers each took a small segment of American culture and made it into their subject. Images that have already been reproduced are the starting point for the photographic works of Re'my Markowitschs and Dennis Adams. For one it was the printed book, for the other the coverage of the abduction of Patricia Hearst in national and international daily newspapers, which served as the source and inspiration for their particular artistic works. While Markowitsch addresses the ethnographic travels of the French cultural philosopher Claude Le'vi-Strauss forty years later and further interprets them through exposing overlaying images, Adams brings the incompetence and the reluctance of the reporting press to the fore in order to draw a clearly outlined image of the stunning daughter of the American publisher. Zbigniew Libera's "Positives" series (2002-2003) closes the circle that began with the reference to the iconifying of reportage images. With the tactics of a guerrilla fighter, the Poland-born artist appropriates photojournalistic classics that for decades have been fixed in the canon of the western writing of photographic history, and "over-writes" their sad, negative meaning with precisely opposing, namely positive signs.

The diversity of media in new photographic methods of narration and documentation can already be identified in this concise selection. The position of each artist is explained by differentiated motivations and approaches. For photographers doing documentary work, one of the primary tasks is to formulate these basic parameters for their own work and to link them to the ethical, moral and political content that they would like to transport.

We are grateful to the Ars Rhenia Stiftung for its support.

Publication: "Stories, Histories - Set 3 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur", collection brochure with works from the exhibition. Essay by Thomas Seelig, German / English. Price Fr. 5.-

Image: Shomei Tomatsu, Japan World Exposition, Osaka, 1970, printed 2003. Thermal dye transfer print, 26,4 x 39,4 cm. Private collection (c) Shomei Tomatsu

Vernissage: 1 September 2006, 6 to 9 p.m.

Fotomuseum Winterthur
Gruzenstrasse 44+45 , 8400 Winterthur (Zurich) Switzerland
Tue-Sun 11am-6pm, Wed 11am-8pm

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