Shomei Tomatsu
Japanese, 1930–2012
Untitled (Kadena, Okinawa)
INV-2042
Shomei Tomatsu
Japanese, 1930–20121969, printed 1978
Untitled (Kadena, Okinawa)
Shomei Tomatsu Japanese, 1930–2012 →photographphotography
Date
1969, printed 1978
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
29 × 41.3 cm (11 7/16 × 16 5/16 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Photography and Media Purchase Fund
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.
Also notable
Works in the same vein
