May 10, 2010

This is enough.


Hibakusha (bomb victim) Tsuyo Kataoka, Nagasaki, 1961
Photograph by Shomei Tomatsu


"Sometimes a photographer is a passenger, sometimes a person who stays in one place. What he watches changes constantly, but his watching never changes. He doesn't examine like a doctor, defend like a lawyer, analyze like a scholar, support like a priest, make people laugh like a comedian, or intoxicate like a singer. He only watches. This is enough. No, this is all I can do. All a photographer can do is watch. Therefore, a photographer has to watch all the time. He must face the object and make his entire body an eye. A photographer is someone who wagers everything on seeing. This is what a photographer is."


Shomei Tomatsu from The Pencil of the Sun, 1975

Please see Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation, published 2004 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press.

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