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Photo Exhibition: “1968 - Japanese Photography”

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2013.

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Yutaka Takanashi - Untitled (Tatsumi Hijikata), 1969

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Provoke: Between Protest and Performance - Photography in Japan 1960-1975

(2016)

Cover Image:

Shomei Tomatsu, Takuma Nakahira, Editor, 1964.

東松照明, 「編集者 中平卓馬」

The short-lived Japanese magazine Provoke, founded in 1968, is nowadays recognized as a major contribution to postwar photography in Japan, featuring the country’s finest representatives of protest photography, vanguard fine art and critical theory in only three issues overall. The magazine’s goal was to mirror the complexities of Japanese society and its art world of the 1960s, a decade shaped by the country’s first large-scale student protests. The movement yielded a wave of new books featuring innovative graphic design combined with photography: serialized imagery, gripping text-image combinations, dynamic cropping and the use of provocatively “poor” materials. The writings and images by Provoke’s members-critic Koji Taki, poet Takahiko Okada, photographers Takuma Nakahira, Yakata Takanashi and Daido Moriyama-were suffused with the tactics developed by Japanese protest photographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu, who pointed at and criticized the mythologies of modern life. Provoke accompanies the first exhibition ever to be held on the magazine and its creators. Illuminating the various uses of photography in Japan at the time, the catalogue focuses on selected projects undertaken between 1960 and 1975 that offer a strongly interpretative account of currents in Japanese art and society at a moment of historical collapse and renewal.

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Provoke: Between Protest and Performance - Photography in Japan 1960-1975

(2016)

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Koji Taki, untitled, 1968.

From Provoke, 1 (November 1968), 18–19.

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Yutaka Takanashi, Toshi-e (Towards the City), Tokyo, 1974.

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Takuma Nakahira, For a Language to Come (1970)

“The image itself is not a thought. It cannot possess a wholeness like that of a concept. Neither is it an interchangeable code like language. Yet its irreversible materiality – the reality that is cut out by the camera – constitutes the opposite side of language, and for this reason at times it stimulates the world of language and concepts. When this happens, language transcends its fixed and conceptualized self, transforming into a new language, and therefore new thought.

At this singular moment – now – language loses its material basis – in short its reality – and drifts in space, we photographers must go on grasping with our own eyes those fragments of reality that cannot possibly be captured with existing language, actively putting forth materials against language and against thought Despite some reservations, this is why we have given Provoke the subtitle, “provocative materials for thought".”

Provoke vol.1, 1968.

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Koji Taki, untitled, 1969.

From Provoke, 3 (August 1969), 54–55.

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To photograph a landscape, I would drive at dusk and press the shutter button while driving. When I stop the car and hold the camera, I realize that the sensations I was feeling in my body while driving have disappeared. I no longer feel motivated to press the shutter, and I return to my car. What I was feeling while driving was that objects were not static, that they disappeared from my view in a flash. I was in a situation in which I was only concerned with a moving vision. I feel that my moving eyes could have possibly given the world a structure, yet when I stopped, the world I saw receded too far to be systematized. When I was in motion, I was being integrated into the performing body, and letting the body (not the eyes) systematize the world. Paths flowed under my feet, never to be seen again. The dusk erased boundaries of all sorts. The world suddenly became bigger, at once more distant and closer.

Taki Kōji, 'Eyes and Things That Are Not Eyes’

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(via Portraits de Photographes #5 Daido Moriyama - YouTube)

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(via Photographers in Focus: Daido Moriyama - YouTube)

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(via The Provocative in Japanese Photography | WideWalls)