The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography: Sandra Phillips and W.S. di Piero in Conversation Posted on September 28, 2009 by Suzanne
Eikoh Hosoe, Yukio Mishima, Ordeal by Roses #6, 1961-1962. Gift of Howard Greenberg © Eikoh Hosoe
One of our current collection exhibitions, The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography presents a number of pictures from that turbulent moment in Japanese history. After the devastation of World War II, Japan entered a period of American military occupation and modernization. Photographers reacted to the drastic sociocultural changes taking place by forging a new visual language that broke with tradition while it memorialized the old culture and recorded the new. SFMOMA began collecting this work in the 1970s, under curators John Humphrey and Van Deren Coke, but the bulk of the collection has been built by senior curator of photography Sandra Phillips over the last two decades. Here, she joins in conversation with poet, essayist, and translator W.S. Di Piero, an avid fan of postwar Japanese photography.
![Shomei Tomatsu, Untitled [Yokosuka], from the series Chewing Gum and Chocolate, 1966, printed 1974; Collection of the Sack Photographic Trust © Shomei Tomatsu](http://blog.sfmoma.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/01-tomatsu-gum.jpg "Shomei Tomatsu, Untitled [Yokosuka], from the series Chewing Gum and Chocolate, 1966, printed 1974; Collection of the Sack Photographic Trust © Shomei Tomatsu")
Shomei Tomatsu, Untitled (Yokosuka) , from the series Chewing Gum and Chocolate). 1966, printed 1974. Collection of the Sack Photographic Trust © Shomei Tomatsu
W.S. Di Piero : I’m interested in it for two reasons: it has the archival memorializing street photography does, and it’s archival memorializing that’s taking place in one of the most critical periods of Japanese history—that time from1945 to roughly the late 1960s, when the American presence was felt first in a terrifying way, and then later in a very different way during the occupation. And all of that was experienced and taken in by these photographers. I think Daido Moriyama was seven or eight years old when they dropped the bomb. He was young, but he was of consciousness when that happened.
SP: Shomei Tomatsu talks about being a kid of, I think, eleven, when he would not go down into the bomb shelters. Instead, he stayed upstairs in his room and looked at the bombs exploding, as though they were fireworks. He was both terrified and fascinated by them. I think that’s the whole key to his work, frankly, being terrified and fascinated by what’s happened. These photographers who experienced the war as children grew up and were—like the Japanese people as a whole—trying to deal with the fact that the Americans were still there, on all these military bases.
