Shomei Tomatsu obituary

Influential Japanese postwar photographer who turned his camera on his homeland
Shomei Tomatsu  
Shomei Tomatsu
Coca-cola, Tokyo, 1969, by Shomei Tomatsu. Photograph: Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery and Nagoya City Art Museum

Shomei Tomatsu, who has died aged 82, was perhaps the most influential Japanese photographer of the postwar era. His raw, grainy and impressionistic style signalled a dramatic break with the quiet formalism that defined earlier Japanese photography, and it influenced many younger photographers, including his friend Daido Moriyama and the often controversial Nobuyoshi Araki. In 1974, the great curator and critic John Szarkowski described Tomatsu as "the pivotal figure of recent Japanese photography", whose images were "an intuitive response to the experience of life itself".

Shomei Tomatsu in 2009
Shomei Tomatsu in 2009. Photograph: Kyodo/AP

Tomatsu's best-known photograph is Melted Bottle, Nagasaki, 1961. It looks at first glance like a skinned animal, but is a beer bottle rendered grotesque and muscular-looking by the intense heat of the nuclear blast that devastated Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. He came upon the bottle and other relics of the atomic blast in a local museum while on an assignment to photograph the reconstruction of the city.

What Tomatsu found in his wanderings though Nagasaki made him rethink his attitude to his country's history as well as to photography. In grainy, monochrome tones, he shot broken marble angels in the grounds of a Christian church and a cracked wristwatch, its hands frozen at 11.02am, the exact time of the nuclear detonation. He also took portraits of survivors whose faces had been scarred by the bomb.

The surreal and unsettling power of the melted bottle image evoked the almost unimaginable horror of the moment and led him into a place beyond reportage or documentary. Later, the American photographer and writer Leo Rubinfien described Tomatsu's Nagasaki images as "sad, haggard facts" and noted that "beneath the surface there was a grief so great that any overt expression of sympathy would have been an insult".

Born in Nagoya, Tomatsu came of age in Japan's turbulent, self-questioning postwar years. He started out as a traditional photojournalist in the early 1950s, but found himself drawn intuitively to the intimate and the everyday. As Szarkowski later put it, Tomatsu was intent on "the rediscovery and restatement, in contemporary terms, of a specifically Japanese sensibility". In 1958, though, keen to show what he saw as the creeping Americanisation of his country, he began photographing the American soldiers stationed in military bases throughout Japan. In his book The Pencil of the Sun (1975) he wrote: "It was as if America seeped though the gaps in the wire fences surrounding the bases and, in time, soaked the entire country."

While photographing the Americans, though, Tomatsu's attitude to them became more complex, even conflicted, and he said later that he experienced "a complex mixture of abhorrence and reverence, a certain fond nostalgia". An outsider by temperament, he found himself socialising with his often extroverted American subjects, who were at ease with his camera. Finally, he produced a series he called Chewing Gum and Chocolate. "In 1945, its cities devastated, Japan was inundated with American soldiers," he wrote. "We were starving, and they threw us chocolate and chewing gum. That was America. For better or worse, that's how I encountered America."

The series was wilfully impressionistic, even poetic, its underlying meanings, both cultural and political, suggested rather than spelt out. He told the younger Moriyama that photography was akin to the haiku. For a brief time, he pointed his camera at the ground, capturing objects trampled into tarmac or embedded in earth. A retrospective book, Nippon, published in 1967, was full of dramatic, often contradictory-seeming, images of landscapes, holy men, traditional actors and half-hidden artefacts.

By then, Japan was feeling the tremors of the youth-cultural upheavals in the west, and two series, Protest, Tokyo and Eros, Tokyo, both 1969, reflect that sense of sudden, turbulent social change. The first records the Tokyo student street protests of the time in a blurred, visceral style, while the second portrays the "underground city" of Shinjuku in central Tokyo, where prostitutes, drifters, hippies and artists lived outside the conventions of society. "The town of Shinjuku makes us feel 'free' even if this is an illusion," he wrote in Oh! Shinjuku, which collected the two series and was published in 1969.

Tomatsu later said he saw the youthful rebellion of that time "through the eyes of a stray dog" and it is no accident that a grainy image of a stray dog came to define the approach of Tomatsu's friend and stylistic heir, Moriyama. Moriyama is currently on show at Tate Modern and Tomatsu has been on show at the Barbican, as part of the Everything Is Moving group show, which finished on 13 January. Though not much older than Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, who was the driving force behind the avant-garde, anti-establishment Provoke photography movement in Japan in the late 1960s, Tomatsu was initially seen as one of the established figures they were reacting against. He is now accepted as their stylistic and even moral mentor, the self-styled outsider who pioneered extreme subjectivity and a visceral approach that elevated the grainy, the broken and the blurred above the formally beautiful.

In 2006, a major retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. It was called Skin of the Nation. Few photographers have looked so closely and penetratingly at and beneath the skin of a nation as Tomatsu did when he turned his camera on his homeland. The results remain by turns startling, disturbing and complex, imbued with all the contradictions he felt about Japan, photography, himself.

Shomei Tomatsu, photographer, born 16 January 1930; died 14 December 2012

This article was amended on 15 January 2013. The original referred to the American critic Leo Rubenstein.