Tamotsu Yatō

Tamotsu Yato (矢頭 保 Yatō Tamotsu, 1928(?) May 1973) was a Japanese photographer and occasional actor responsible for pioneering Japanese homoerotic photography and creating iconic black-and-white images of the Japanese male. He was a friend and collaborator of the writer Yukio Mishima and the film critic Donald Richie, as well as a long-term romantic partner[1] of Meredith Weatherby, an expatriate American publisher and translator of Mishima's works into English. Yato completed three volumes of photography.

Even though Yato's work received only a limited public distribution, it has attained a cult following and has been acknowledged as a major influence by a number of artists working with male erotica. Thus, Sadao Hasegawa remarks in his Paradise Visions: "Tamotsu Yato achieved fame by creating Otoko, a picture book. He photographed Yukio Mishima, nude. His subjects: traditional, muscular, unsophisticated countryside men, are mostly extinct today. Otoko was valuable because you could see these long-bodied, stout-legged, cropped hair, square-jawed men... Good-bye, men of Nippon!"

Books by Tamotsu Yato

Notes

  1. Donald Richie, The Japan Journals: 1947-2004; Jeffrey Angles, interview with Takahashi Mutsuo.

See also

References

External links


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/6/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.