And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
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Shomei Tomatsu-The most influential Japanese photographer of the postwar era
Shōmei Tōmatsu (東松 照明, Tōmatsu Shōmei, January 16, 1930 – December 14, 2012) was a Japanese photographer.Born in Nagoya in 1930, Tōmatsu studied economics at Aichi University, graduating in 1954. While still a student, he had his photographs published by the major Japanese photography magazines. He entered Iwanami and worked on the series Iwanami Shashin Bunko. Two years later, he left in order to freelance. In 1959, Tōmatsu formed Vivo with Eikoh Hosoe and Ikkō Narahara. Two years later, his and Ken Domon's book Hiroshima–Nagasaki Document 1961, on the effects of the atomic bombs, was published to great acclaim. In 1972, he moved to Okinawa; in 1975, his prizewinning book of photographs of Okinawa, Pencil of the Sun (太陽の鉛筆, Taiyō no enpitsu) was published. Tōmatsu moved to Nagasaki in 1998. Tōmatsu died in Naha (Okinawa) on 14 December 2012 (although this was not publicly announced until January 2013
“Bottle Melted and Deformed by Atomic Bomb Heat, Radiation, and Fire, Nagasaki” (1961)
“Prostitute” (1957)
“Untitled (Yokosuka),” from the series “Chewing Gum and Chocolate” (1959)
“Hibakusha Tsuyo Kataoka, Nagasaki” (1961)
“Coca-cola, Tokyo” (1969)
Shomei Tomatsu, Blood & Roses 2, Tokyo 1969
“Untitled,” from the series “Protest, Tokyo” (1969)
“Untitled,” from the series “Protest, Tokyo” (1969)
“Boy and the Sea,” Tokyo, 1969
The Moriyama – Tomatsu: Tokyo exhibition was conceived by artists Daido Moriyama and Shomei Tomatsu – before the latter’s death in 2012 – as a way to celebrate their city around a first artistic collaboration.
From Wednesday, December 16, the MEP is proud to bring together more than 400 works from the 1950s to today, which we owe to two of the most influential and essential photographers of our time. In their way, each of them nurtured a real passion for the city of Tokyo, which they have been leading for decades. This double retrospective is the first devoted to Tomatsu in France and one of the most important around the work of Moriyama. It’s a tribute to Japanese photography and the world’s greatest metropolis
From Wednesday, December 16, the MEP is proud to bring together more than 400 works from the 1950s to today, which we owe to two of the most influential and essential photographers of our time. In their way, each of them nurtured a real passion for the city of Tokyo, which they have been leading for decades. This double retrospective is the first devoted to Tomatsu in France and one of the most important around the work of Moriyama. It’s a tribute to Japanese photography and the world’s greatest metropolis
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