Haruo Tomiyama - Our Day - 1971

Our Day

Haruo Tomiyama
Chuokoron-sha/1971/Japanese/265*217

A collection of photographs by Japanese photographer Haruo Tomiyama, entitled “Gendai Sokan” (Contemporary Views). Haruo Tomiyama worked as a commissioned photographer for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper after World War II, and became famous for his works depicting the turbulent times of high economic growth from the 1960s onward. This book is the sixth issue of the “Image no Gendai” series, a collection of works by one of Japan's leading photographers of the time. Here is an interesting text by Shoji Yamagishi of Camera Mainichi at the end of the book. During his stay in Paris, he had the opportunity to show the works of Japanese photographers to Henri Cartier-Bresson. He said of the photographs of his contemporaries Daido Moriyama and Masahisa Fukase, “They look like plastic. They are nonsense.” Bresson, who had bluntly refused to accept my objections, replied, ”It is not that society or the times are sick, but only that the photographers are sick. He was convinced that society and the times are not sick, only the photographers are sick. I couldn't stand it any longer,” he said, ”I immediately grabbed my camera and ran out of the house. He was amazed that there was a young man in Japan who could take such wonderful pictures,” Yamagishi said. According to Yamagishi, “Toyama's clear and dynamic images have the power to draw our eyes to a cross-section of reality that we might otherwise miss.