Artist Talk: Shomei Tomatsu

Shomei Tomatsu, one of Japan’s foremost twentieth-century photographers, created one of the defining portraits of postwar Japan. Beginning in the late 1950s, Tomatsu committed to photographing as many of the American military bases in Japan as possible, focusing on the seismic impact of the American victory and occupation: uniformed American soldiers carousing in red-light districts with Japanese women; foreign children at play in seedy landscapes, home to American forces; and the emerging protest formed in