BLACK SUN : The Dawn of the Nuclear Age Has : Inspired an Exhibit of Work By Four of Japan’s : Foremost Contemporary Photographers : BY ZAN DUBIN

ONE SIMPLE photograph of a watch that stopped at 11:02 a.m. symbolizes the theme linking the works of four contemporary Japanese photographers in “Dark Sun: Eyes of Four,” which will open at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park on Sept. 12 and run through Nov. 8.

The timepiece pictured below was frozen on Aug. 9, 1945, when an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. It represents the dawn of the Nuclear Age, and the start of Japan’s occupation by the Allies, an era witnessed by photographers Eikoh Hosoe, Shomei Tomatsu, Masahisa Fukase and Daido Moriyama.

“The four photographers’ styles are totally different,” says Mark Holborn, an arts writer who organized the exhibit of 160 black-and-white photographs with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “But the artists all tell the same story--the story of growing up in post-war Japan, a search for their roots, a search for identity, and a journey back into the past and into memory.”