There are plenty of texts dealing with the West's perception of Japan, but the Shomei Tomatsu retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (
sfmoma.org
), from May 13 to Aug. 13, gives Western audiences a chance to discover how the Japanese see themselves. The atom bomb, Americanization, urbanization and the postwar rebuilding of Japan all figure prominently in
Skin of the Nation
, which collects some of the 76-year-old master's most famous images from the 1950s to the present. Among them is the haunting
Bottle Melted and Deformed by Atomic Bomb Heat, Radiation, and Fire, Nagasaki
a gelatin silver...
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