Shomei Tomatsu was a photographer born in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, in 1930. After working for Iwanami Photo Library, he became a freelance photographer, and in 1959 co-founded the photographers’ collective VIVO with Ikko Narahara, Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, and others.
Kingdom of Mud was published in 1978 as Volume 12 of Asahi Sonorama’s Sonorama Photo Selection series. The book is composed of photographs taken during Tomatsu’s approximately one-month assignment in Afghanistan in 1963 as a correspondent for the magazine Taiyo.
The book contains images of Kabul during the monarchy period, rural landscapes, everyday life, mud houses, and the earth itself. While some of the photographs overlap with those in Salaam Aleikum, the volume also includes previously unpublished works. Created in a place different from the subjects of Tomatsu’s major postwar Japan projects—such as Nagasaki, U.S. military bases, and Okinawa—this book documents Afghanistan in the 1960s.
Sonorama Photo Selection 12: Kingdom of Mud Shomei Tomatsu Asahi Sonorama, 1978 217 × 207 × 17 mm Good condition for its age
