Black Sun: The Eyes of Four, Roots and Innovation in Japanese Photography

by Mark Holborn

Black Sun is an unprecedented portrait of postwar Japan through the eyes of four of the nation's most significant photographers. It encompasses and connects ancient Japanese prophecies, the terror of nuclear destruction, and the results of swift and massive westernization. Eikoh Hosoe, Shomei Tomatsu, Masahisa Fukase, and Daido Moriyama are widely acknowledged in Japan as masters of photography. Their work ranges from the metaphoric to the documentary, from the presentation of post-apocalyptic artifacts to portraits of crows and crowded city streets. However varied the approach, this work is unified by a sense of innovation and a persistent search for native roots. Eikoh Hosoe's representation of the demonic myth Kamaitachi is structured like a dance, enacted among the villagers of the far north country and evoking Hosoe's childhood memories of the final years of World War II. Shomei Tomatsu's work ranges from the legacy of Nagasaki to the student riots of the sixties. His photographs combine social documentary with a search for personal identity, a quest which concludes among the remote islanders of Okinawa. Masahisa Fukase's epic series Crow adopts the universal symbol of the black bird as evil omen. The crow's somber presence shadows Fukase's journey to his birthplace on the northern island of Hokkaido, fusing private memories to a darker, national heritage. Daido Moriyama uncovers the malice lurking in the alleys and backstreets of Tokyo. With his confrontational, highly graphic style, Moriyama reveals the overpowering density of life in modern Japan. In the accompanying text, Mark Holborn creates his own picture of Japan's creative climate, one in which audacious exploration crashes against a legacy of tradition and refinement. He provides previously undocumented links between the photographers and other leading Japanese artists of our time, such as filmmaker Nagisa Oshima, graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo, and dancer Tatsumi Hijikata.

Genres: Photography, Japan, Art

80 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1986

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this issue after a long fascination with PROVOKE and eventually seeing a retrospective at the Fondation Cartier-Bresson in Paris. Both the retrospective and the magazine taught me how this movement came into existence, the problems Japan had in its megalomanic urban environments and how the youth had forgotten about the horrors their parents could lively remember during World War II. As an academic student of photography where the teachers were fascinated by Düsseldorf School photography (Bechers, Gursky, etc.) there was little appreciation for what photographers like Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira and Masahisa Fukase meant for the image of post-war Japan and how it still influences photography to this day with great artists like Rinko Kawauchi and Daisuke Yokota, who continue a new tradition of deleting signs and language in photography to create a new narrative in its history as an artform. Where Europeans fail to detach photography from painting the Japanese do not only succeed to be inspired by the qualities of painting but to also use them as a derive to turn photography into something much more powerful than a historic document.

This is PROVOKE and I'm happy to have found this magazine as a historic document that appreciates and willingly writes on this movement as a subject from an intelligent point of view.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I "read" this book for the purpose of the photography. The book comes with exegesis on the photos and the life of the photographers, but I rarely partake of that commentary in general, and specifically did not in this book because it seemed, from what I did read, to devolve into evocative, esoteric language so commonly alienating in modern art analysis.

The photographs, though few, were superb. Eikoh Hosoe's work was particularly stunning. Most of the photos had either historical significance or did a great job of reflecting the work of the particular photographer. Many of them were the types of photos I wish I could take--strange, spontaneous, and rare.