Under the skin

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There are plenty of texts dealing with the West's perception of Japan, but the Shomei Tomatsu retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sfmoma.org, from May 13 to Aug. 13, gives Western audiences a chance to discover how the Japanese see themselves. The atom bomb, Americanization, urbanization and the postwar rebuilding of Japan all figure prominently in Skin of the Nation, which collects some of the 76-year-old master's most famous images from the 1950s to the present. Among them is the haunting Bottle Melted and Deformed by Atomic Bomb Heat, Radiation, and Fire, Nagasaki — a gelatin silver print that darkly conveys the force of the atomic bomb that had devastated the city in 1945.

The stark Prostitute, Nagoya conjures up the seedier underbelly of the mid-century boom years. Later images — like the strange, wriggling creatures of Ruinous Garden, or the rusting steel of the series Scrapped Boat, Nagasaki — are more abstract and puzzling, as if mirroring the confusion and disillusionment that took hold when the boom turned to bust. Poised between the horrors of its past and the possibilities of its future, modern Japan has been a society in constant flux: there can be few more acute observers of this process than Shomei Tomatsu.