The work of Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012) covers more than six decades of Japanese history.

Tomatsu was twenty years old when he started to take photos. The technique was not unfamiliar to him: his two brothers were enthusiasts and had even set up an improvised dark room in a closet. When, later on, a teacher criticized his first photographic work, which was surrealist in tone, and suggested he adopted the path of realism, Tomatsu redirected his focus towards reality. That was where it would always stay, but in an extraordinarily unique way, accentuating and forcing out the expressive and communicative capacities of the photographic image, exploring its symbolic potential to the point where he created an aesthetic that deliberately distanced itself from photojournalism thus founding, in a certain sense, a new form of documentary photography.

The publication proves to be a reference work for gaining a detailed insight into the work of Shomei Tomatsu from the 1950s until his death in 2012.