In 1995, an exchange program took Xiaochun to art school in Kassel, Germany, where he began to make photographs that were distinguished by the presence of a life-size mannequin, dressed in traditional Chinese attire and bearing the artist's own facial features. The artist calls this mannequin "He" and says that it represents both himself and China's highest cultural traditions. The photographs are not just disguised self-portraits, he says. They function visually if "He" is covered up.

Xiaochun's first "He" photographs, taken in Germany, suggest the artist's cultural isolation and his frequent inability to communicate his emotions in a foreign language. Starting in about 2002, Xiaochun began to make panoramic photographs of China with "He" in them. Taking multiple pictures of the same scene, he joined them seamlessly with digital technology to create images that honor China's painting traditions.

Capital(2003) is a vertical scroll-like C-print (8.5 ft. high x 2 ft. 8 in. wide) of a street scene in today's China. At the top of the picture is an office building with an advertising sign on its roof and another sign partly covering its faade. At ground level are more ads and inflatable New Year's decorations -- cartoon rams and parrots and a bright yellow arch with lettering on it. A double-decker bus speeds by in the street, its passage a blur. Bicyclists and pedestrians wait on the curb. Standing apart from them, "He" looks directly at the viewer. Nobody seems to notice the mannequin. In the foreground, a woman counts her cash after buying groceries. Four blurry men cross the plaza behind her.

As Xiaochun explains it, Capital is "close to a traditional hanging scroll in which images are depicted according to the principle of three distances' (san yuan), with a focus on high mountain peaks (gao yuan), the 'middle distance' scenery (zhong yuan) and the far-away vista (ping yuan)." If a conventional camera were used to take this picture, the woman in the foreground would be much larger, blocking the view behind her. The horizon would be in the middle of the composition.

"This goes against my intention to represent different views," he states. "So what I have done in this picture is to elevate the background and lower the figure in the foreground. The size and spatial relationship also change accordingly."

The "different views" in Capital seem stacked on top of each other -- the woman with the four men out of focus behind her; the pedestrians and "He" in focus with the blurry, fast-moving bus behind them; and the garish flat building faade in the background substituting for mountain peaks. "He" is inconspicuous, much like the sages and hermits who sit by caves and waterfalls in Chinese art.

We look down on Wuxi from the hill where Xiaochun sat as a schoolboy when he made his first watercolor painting. Mirage "combines many individual shots," the artist explains, "I climbed the hill day after day, using two tripods to support a large-format camera with an enormous lens. The guard on the hill got to know me quite well."

The first thing we see in Mirage is a cable lift with a dark green support pillar and two orange cars passing each other. "He" rides in the car going uphill on the right and the artist stands with his back to us in the car going down. Beyond the lift are apartment buildings, factories, expressways, a suspended bridge and a river.

The city center in the far distance is all recent multi-story architecture. We notice the tip of a pagoda projecting up through the vegetation on a tree-covered hill in the right foreground. Beneath the trees is the city zoo, as yet un-modernized. There is so much detail in Mirage -- and so many ways we can look at it that it seems new every time we visit it.

In his latest work, Xiaochun retires "He." Celebration (2004) is a transparency, measuring more than five by seven feet, that shows the inauguration of a large Beijing real estate project. Celebration suggests "the momentary nature of contemporary events," the artist says.

From a high perspective, we see a complex of curtain-wall high-rises that would be at home in any U.S. city. On a stage at ground level, red-uniformed musicians play and dancers perform. A huge crowd fills the plaza and surrounds the stage. We see construction men -- or police --dressed in orange uniforms with bright yellow helmets and festive people who resemble U.S. football fans wearing silly hats and wigs.

Instead of showing the mannequin, says Xiaochun, Celebration often depicts the same person more than once, for example a journalist who photographs the scene from two or three vantage points. Celebration "conveys a different sense of reality because it represents the whole process of the event," says the artist. "He" is no longer necessary because "the connection between the photograph and traditional culture is found in the style of the photograph." In old Chinese paintings, a figure may appear several times, representing a sequence of events. The artist has absorbed this "pictorial language" or "style" into his work.

Ezra Pound once called artists "the antennae of the race." They understand the human spirit in ways that the rest of us do not -- and often issue prophetic statements. China is losing its soul to progress, and Miao Xiaochun evokes its great past in his art. We cannot praise this work enough.

Miao Xiaochun's exhibition, "Phantasmagoria," was on view Oct. 1-Dec 3, 2004, at Walsh Gallery in Chicago, Ill.

Tōmatsu is best known for his photographs of horribly scarred survivors of the Nagasaki atomic bomb. The Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs encouraged him to take these pictures so the public and policymakers in the Soviet Union, Europe and the United States would see just what such weapons do. Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document 1961 (1961), in which these photographs were published, initially appeared with text in Russian and English, but not in Japanese. Japan had to wait five years for the book to be published and distributed there.

The Nagasaki photographs are riveting, but we need help to understand them Hibakusha Tsuyo Kataoka (1961) shows a middle-aged woman with the left half of her face seemingly melted, a result of exposure to the heat of the bomb blast. We are horrified by her appearance, but nothing tells us how the woman was hurt. Equally jolting, once we figure it out, is Bottle Melted and Deformed by Atomic Bomb Heat, Radiation, and Fire, Nagasaki (1961), which looks like the skinned body of some animal, possibly a human being, suspended from above. Other images from this series include a Piet molded on a metal door whose features were melted by bomb heat and made smooth.

Tōmatsu claims not to be a photojournalist, but he has made his living from magazine assignments and publishing books like the Nagasaki suite. He has a photojournalist's eye for contemporary life and spent years taking pictures of the American military in Japan. Forbidden to set foot on U.S. military bases, he hung around the shops, bars and brothels that sprang up to service them. He photographed strip-tease joints, sailors on leave, military couples, B-2 bombers and mixed-race children of Japanese women who had black fathers. Some of these photographs contain so little information that we might place them almost anywhere. Sailors, prostitutes and military aircraft are pretty much the same all over the world.

Tōmatsu's photographs are too journalistic to be called art. There are some interesting camera angles, compositions and lighting here, but this work owes a huge debt to Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan and Edward Steichen. We see little that is truly innovative and no particular point of view. Neither journalist nor artist, Tōmatsu falls between two poles. Basically, he is a maker of uneven images whose work requires much too much literary explanation.

"Shōmei Tōmatsu, Skin of the Nation" appeared at the Japan Society Gallery, New York (Sept. 22, 2004-Jan. 2, 2005) and subsequently tours to the Corcoran Gallery of Art (May 21-Aug. 29, 2005), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (May 13-Aug.13, 2006) and The Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland (Sept. 1-Nov.12, 2006).