ART REVIEW : JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHERS CREATE IN LIGHT OF ‘BLACK SUN’

Over the last decade, several young German painters have splashed upon the American art scene with powerful images of postwar German life and thought. World War II served as a formative influence in these artists’ lives, whatever their ages, and their paintings deal, in great part, with the legacy of the war and its continuing demands for social and spiritual recovery.

The San Diego Museum of Art’s current show, “Black Sun: The Eyes of Four,” illustrates that in Japan as well a generation of artists emerged, fueled by the war’s aftermath. All four of the photographers--Eikoh Hosoe, Shomei Tomatsu, Masahisa Fukase and Daido Moriyama--experienced the war with the eyes and sensibilities of children. As they matured, their wartime experiences surfaced as seminal to their personal, artistic identities. Whether their photographs address this directly or obliquely, the work is indelibly stamped with the shadow of 1945’s “black sun.”

Hosoe, the first artist encountered in the museum’s extremely elegant installation of the show, was 11 in 1944 when he and his mother were evacuated from Tokyo and taken to a northern Japanese village. Nearly 25 years later, Hosoe returned to the north as a successful photographer to explore his wartime memories. He went with Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of the Japanese modern dance form of Butoh, and together they staged a theatrical series of images tracing the exploits of “Kamaitachi,” the mythical demon of the rice fields.

In these sensual, haunting images, Hosoe manages to render photography a non-literal medium. What he portrays are images from the culture’s collective imagination, its myths and traditional beliefs. As the demon Kamaitachi, Hijikata is ever-present, taunting, seducing and terrorizing the villagers. He poses, broods and runs through the water-soaked fields. His presence both menaces and entertains, depending on whether he is snarling in a dark corner or leaping above a cluster of children.

In some images he is the focus of the villagers, in others he is as a spirit, invisible yet wholly present. Hosoe’s highly evocative images, exploring the range of Kamaitachi’s attributes, have the non-sequential, non-rational quality of dreams. The scenes are exaggerated yet vague, mysteries that no daytime logic could concoct.

Shomei Tomatsu, whose teen years were spent in the American-occupied city of Nagoya, is represented here not by one series, as is Hosoe, but by fragments from a decade of work on different themes. This approach drastically abbreviates each series, but Tomatsu’s distinct vision lends a coherence to the sampler.

From the violent energy of his “Eros” series to the quiet dignity of his Okinawa island work, Tomatsu focuses on details to suggest larger states. This succeeds most poignantly in his 1959 “Farmhouse” series, where meditative concentrations on single objects--an iron kettle nestled in a niche, a broken rice bowl, a wooden chopping block stuck with sliced scallions--convey a sense of Japan’s rich, underlying spiritualism.

Tomatsu’s formal spareness and elegance prevails even in the face of the grittiest subject matter--the human and architectural scars of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. An image made in 1962 shows a man whose shadowed face and shoulders frame the illuminated evidence on his neck--scars that force the skin to stretch like sinews across his body. Like Tomatsu’s photographs of fallen stone angels in a churchyard, and a beheaded statue of a saint, the image becomes an emblem of the bomb’s human toll, a witness to quiet, enduring suffering.

The two most potent images in this series, and Tomatsu’s best known, depict a beer bottle transformed by the blast into a gnarled slab of flesh, and a watch face, stopped by the force of the explosion at 11:02, Aug. 9, 1945. Tomatsu’s simple, iconic approach to the objects intensifies their magnetic power.

The other two artists in the exhibit present work of substantially less power than that of Hosoe or Tomatsu. In Masahisa Fukase’s “Crow--A Symbol,” the foreboding birds hover over skeletal trees, gray, grainy skies, and a statue of the Buddhist goddess of mercy. Fukase began this series as he journeyed to the northern island of Hokkaido, after his divorce. More than just personal symbols of doom, however, the crows assume the air of ever-present reminders or harbingers of evil, and especially in the context of this show, shadows of war.

Within these dark, moody works are occasional touches of a more benign elegance. Crow tracks in the snow, in one image, double as silhouettes of the birds flying, thus revealing a subtle symmetry to the birds’ lives. Even within the few pictures exhibited here, however, Fukase’s theme feels cramped and limited.

Daido Moriyama’s “The Surface of the City” offers a more conceptual, formal vision in contrast to the myth and mystery seen elsewhere in the show. Most of the images are unremarkable isolations of urban objects, such as a soda bottle, a tire and a motorcycle headlight. Presented in clusters of four or six, the images begin to form visual rhymes of shapes and textures, and they gain some cumulative interest. Most are dark, somewhat dreary images of industrial, westernized Tokyo, images that resonate with Moriyama’s memories of childhood play in a deserted rubber factory after the war.

“Black Sun,” organized by the Alfred Stieglitz Center of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, and the Arts Council of Great Britain, continues through Nov. 8. A well-illustrated catalogue, with text by Mark Holborn, accompanies the exhibition.

At 2 p.m. Nov. 7, the museum will present a program of new Japanese experimental and documentary video, in conjunction with the exhibition, in the Copley Auditorium.