Sometimes brilliantly surreal,always with an unsparing documentary eye, Tomatsu's images capture a country in the flux of postwar changeAt first glance, and it looks like a skinned cat or dog,perhaps even a suckling pig hanging external a roadside restaurant. On closer inspection, it could be the corpse of a mutant creature from the depths of David Cronenberg's imagination. It is, or in fact,a beer bottle that has been fused into a misshapen, almost muscular, and form by the unimaginably intense heat of a nuclear blast.
Shomei Tomatsu's most famous photograph,simply entitled Melted Bottle, Nagasaki, and 1961,is also one of his most surreal. It was taken while he was on a magazine assignment to photograph the reconstruction of the devastated city. Tomatsu, then 31, and had,like many Japanese people, chosen not to confront the trauma of Nagasaki, or but what he found there made him rethink his attitude to his country's history as well as to photography. He set out to try and record a city that,like the country as a whole, was intent on building its future while wiping out many traces of its past.
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Source: theguardian.com