Untitled (Kadena, Okinawa)

Shomei TomatsuWW-1969-027562

1969·Gelatin silver print·29 × 41.3 cm (11 7/16 × 16 5/16 in.)

<p>After three years spent seeking permission to enter Okinawa—a group of Japanese South Sea islands annexed by the United States following World War II—Shomei Tomatsu finally gained entry in 1969. Tomatsu was initially opposed to American military control. This picture, a photomontage, is one of a series made to suggest the terror caused by bomber flights on a nation that had recently endured nuclear holocaust. As he wrote to accompany the series’s first publication (also in 1969): “B-52s are enormous bomb-machines—they can travel all over the world with a single aerial refueling—that can carry two 24-megaton hydrogen bombs, 10,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Okinawans call the B-52s ‘assassin of the sky’ or ‘black death machines’ and are afraid of them.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1969
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: 29 × 41.3 cm (11 7/16 × 16 5/16 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Shomei Tomatsu

Artist

Shomei Tomatsu

Printmaking

Shomei Tomatsu was a Japanese photographer who documented postwar Japan with unflinching attention to the material traces of American occupation, industrial transformation, and everyday life. Working primarily in black and white, he combined documentary precision with a modernist formal sensibility, capturing both the debris of war and the texture of urban surfaces. His photographs from the 1950s and 1960s constitute a visual archive of Japan's rapid reconstruction and cultural displacement.

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