At the Limits of the Gaze

Takuma Nakahira is hardly a household name even among those with an interest in contemporary Japanese photography. It’s probably safe to say that he is mostly remembered for being a member of the short-lived collective Provoke whose aesthetic has remained with us in the work of one of his peers (and close friend), Daidō Moriyama.

By now, Provoke has mostly been reduced to an aesthetic, a look, and it’s not hard to argue that this is what it quickly became (as Nakahira himself noted, more on this shortly). But the group essentially was engaging in a form a protest, a protest that was connected to students revolting in the streets.

In the 1960s, Japan entered an unprecedented period of prosperity, fueled by its government’s embrace of consumerist capitalism. There was a pay off, though: people would have to accept the rule of its political class, in particular the LDP, the party that has ruled over Japan for most of its post-war period and that is notorious for its corruption.

Nakahira and many of his peers were not particularly eager to acquiesce, and they saw photography — and visuals in general — as being one of the main tools used by the ruling class (with the media in cahoots with it). Provoke’s embrace of its particular aesthetic — a harsh black and white in which photographic materials were pushed to their limits — was intended to provide a counterpoint.

“I have the premonition that I cannot take photographs except in a form that includes a critique of photography as a social mode of expression,” he wrote in an article entitled Why an Illustrated Botanical Guide?, which is included in At the Limits of the Gaze, a newly released English-language selection of his writing, edited and translated by Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard.

Nakahira wrote this essay after the end of Provoke, and it was first published in Japan in 1973. The entirety of the sentence I just quoted from is extremely important to understand Nakahira. “If photography is a language itself,” he continued (page 78; please note that I am omitting three short words for reasons of basic legibility), “then perhaps the only thing demanded of photographers working in the field of expression is to produce a meta-language of photography that incorporated self-critique.”

In a nutshell, this was to have been Provoke — but it wasn’t. Nakahira published his own Provoke photographs in For a New Language to Come; and then he realized that none of it made sense. Furthermore, he discovered that the Provoke aesthetic and ideas could also be found out in that real world (an advertisement for a rail company). He is said to have destroyed his Provoke work, to start anew.

In 1977, tragedy struck. Abbe and Prichard speak of a “fever-induced coma”, the catalogue of a recent retrospective at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is more blunt: “In September 1977, Nakahira was struck down by acute alcohol poisoning. While he recovered from a near-death experience, the incident left him with impaired memory and linguistic capacity.” (from Nakahira Takuma: Burn–Overflow, LIVE Art Books, 2024, p. 287)

Nakahira continued photographing, but his career as a writer and critic had come to an end. So besides understanding Provoke, why should we read this writer’s essays, given that most of them are by now fifty years old?

The answer can in part be found in the long sentence I quoted above and in the role photography still plays in shaping our world. Even as circumstances have changed considerably, the big questions Nakahira was interested in tackling remain unsolved, in particular what role photographers might play vis-à-vis capitalism, which by now as morphed into its even more acidic version, neoliberal capitalism.

As photographers, do we, should we acquiesce? If not, what form might it take to create a counterpoint? And what responsibility might we have as photographers and critics in a world in which more than ever, photography has become the most dominant form of human expression?

As a reader, you will have to do a little bit of work to unearth some of the larger themes that Nakahira was interested in. But it’s worth the effort, in particular since his main themes are still enormously relevant.

It’s not clear to me that it would even be possible to find the form of photography that Nakahira was so interested in. By construction, photography forms an integral part of our social conduct. A type of photography fully detached from social interactions — can this exist?

In addition, Nakahira’s fundamental mistake was to think that photography is (or might be) a language. Even though photography shares some characteristics with language — it communicates meaning through the use of its constituent parts — these constituent parts by themselves are too non-neutral for the whole to be able to operate as its own, real language. What we might call the real world will always pull photography back to what Nakahira was trying to escape from (in particular given capitalism’s relentless willingness to appropriate and neuter dissent).

Still, I suspect that Nakahira would be amazed by how the people he referred to as “the anonymous masses” (p. 106) make use of photography now. No doubt, he would probably be even more critical of how photography and images shape our capitalist world.

If anything, the eleven essays in At the Limits of the Gaze demonstrate the presence of an extremely multi-faceted and highly educated person. Nakahira was not only a photographer and writer/critic. At some stage, he was translating books (he mentions in passing how that disappeared, with alcohol playing a role). He worked as a designer and as an editor.

And he must have read books at a pace scarcely imaginable. I am unable to think of a contemporary writer/critic around photography who is as widely read as Nakahira was. At the Limits of the Gaze certainly lifts the bar of what photography writing can offer when it is done well.

How or why a rather modest, 164 page softcover book is to be sold for $29.95 escapes me, though. It would really be too bad if the high price point would prevent some people from buying what constitutes an extremely important addition to photography criticism available in English.

Highly recommended.

At the Limits of the Gaze; selected writings by Takuma Nakahira; 164 pages; Aperture; 2025

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Blank Verse

One of the reasons why a photobook has the potential to be more than a collection of photographs is the possibility of the creation of a new world, in which the pictures play a subordinate role. For anyone familiar with the photobook, this is a truism, possibly a trite one at that. And yet, when encountering a book that succeeds particularly well at this game I still find myself marveling at it.

I couldn’t even say exactly what kind of world is presented in Maria Siorba‘s Blank Verse, and to be honest, I’m not particular eager to find out. Or rather, I’m not particular eager to find ways to put it into words, because I don’t want to lose being enthralled by the book’s magic. Of course, this approach will not help you, the reader. But maybe in what follows I can still use words to bring you closer to understanding the book and to you wanting to buy your own copy.

I’ve often been puzzled by the question whether it is possible to mix black-and-white and colour photographs. As far as I know, no country has passed a law prohibiting the intermingling of such photographs. And yet, many photographers are hesitant to do it because black-and-white and colour photographs look different.

The problem here is that if as a photographer you only focus on what your pictures look like, you will not get far. You will remain at the base level of what the medium has to offer, and there can be many good applications for that. However, if you consider what photographs make you feel or what they allude to, then suddenly the question stops making sense.

Blank Verse contains mostly black-and-white photographs that are printed on a matte paper that draws in the inks, resulting in shadows that dissolve what might be hidden inside them. For a lot of work, that would be a real disaster. Here, however, it works really well, and it’s used to great effect.

In addition, there are a few colour photographs, and they’re printed on an extremely glossy and lightweight paper stock. This could easily go awry, but, again, it works incredibly well. In fact, the viewer encounters the black-and-white photograph on the book’s cover as the first colour image after the title page.

The use of different papers adds another important aspect to the book. Handling any book requires a form of intervention that we are all used to. It’s just that we ordinarily don’t think much about it, because most book makers do not want to draw attention to it. To look at a book, you have to turn the pages, and you do so by touching them.

Here, though, given the difference between the papers, the experience of looking through the book is interrupted by the pages that carry the colour photographs. The paper feels light and fragile, whereas the photographs themselves mostly feel somewhat bolder than the others (but not because they’re in colour). This is an incredible device that I don’t remember from another book.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not asking for any of the devices described above to be used. All I’m asking for is a book that makes me experience something that I am unfamiliar with, a book that opens up a world to me in a fashion that moves me (anything goes).

Good photobook making is not focused on the devices it uses (even as, alas, too many people focus on those, whether as book makers or viewers). Instead, it is based on creating a unique whole that communicates what it needs to communicate.

While preparing for the task of writing this piece, I looked at the photographer’s website to see how the work is presented there. There’s a statement, the kind of statement contemporary art schools and curators appear to prefer. The statement does little justice to the work (which isn’t necessarily a bad problem to have). And there are the pictures, which operate and communicate in a very different fashion.

It’s astounding to me how much the work opens up inside the context of this book. Whoever put the book together in this fashion — I am unable to tell from the book itself, but I’d like to think that it was a collaboration between the photographer and the publisher — did an amazing job.

I have previously written about books produced by Départ Pour l’Image, a relatively young publisher based in Milan, Italy. On their website, they describe their work as focusing “on the possibilities of seeing by means of the image, on the border between photography and contemporary art”. In light of the books I have seen, this strikes me as an apt description.

But the possibilities of seeing by means of the image — isn’t that a wonderful way to escape the often narrow confines of a world of photography that still is too centered on, well, rather limited/limiting and often outdated ways of thinking around its pictures?

After all, the possibilities of seeing by means of the image states explicitly that there can be more than what photographs show, and you can pull that out by putting them together in a smart fashion. Furthermore, there are ways of seeing that extent beyond those that focus on form and content (or on that ghastly restriction of facts).

If anything, Blank Verse demonstrates not only the potential of the photobook. It also showcases an artist that I hope to see more of in the coming years.

But the book also tells this aging grouch who spends too much time holed up in a small room right underneath a mountain that while of late, the photobook medium has become a bit stale, there still are those who aspire to offer more and who show the way forward.

Highly recommended.

Blank Verse; photographs by Maria Siorba; 56 pages; Départ Pour l’Image; 2025

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Everybody Dance!

One of the defining features of totalitarian or authoritarian regimes is that they know that they cannot possibly live up to the seemingly lofty ideals they aspire to reach. The Soviet Union’s communist paradise was as unrealistic and unreachable as the fascist glorified past that now is talked about so much. But any regime needs visuals: images that convey its inherent goodness, its power, and the nobility of its aspirations.

Democracies can typically afford to be relaxed about its visuals (even though its public art is mostly cringe worthy): they don’t have to be perfect or powerful because the messiness of democracy in action means that there always is room for improvement (resulting in opportunities for people). Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, however, must present perfect visuals because anything less than perfection is seen as a weakness (the very weakness that is caked into their systems).

This is not to say that democracies do not have any weaknesses. But democracies can allow for those weaknesses to exist. As we’re now witnessing, the moment that mechanism is broken — for example through the imposition of a totalitarian economic system such as neoliberalism, democracies start unraveling rapidly.

One of the crucial aspects to how political regimes present themselves is that the visuals make sense to those in the system, but they can look outlandish, even bizarre, to those outside. It’s not necessarily a clownish outlandishness (even though that certainly can be present as well). If totalitarian and authoritarian regimes only presented clownish visuals, they would have no appeal even to those living under them.

This fact is connected to how visuals, in particular images, work: their meaning can never be fixed enough so that every person views them in exactly the same fashion. Meanwhile, the underlying mechanisms can be found in very different contexts.

For example, if you wanted to you could connect the dominant imagery produced by Nazi Germany to imagery coming out of Hollywood. After all, imagery that projects a sense of power is widely used for all kinds of purposes. As a consequence, as revolting as Leni Riefenstahl’s work was (not even to mention the regime she glorified), her imagery still fascinates many people — including people whose political affiliations are far from the Nazi regime.

In much the same fashion, imagery produced by the Soviet Union, a regime that was also responsible for mass atrocities and the deaths of millions of people, still fascinates, in particular those who never had to deal with even just indirect consequences of that regime.

One way to subvert how images work is by juxtaposing them in a way they were not intended to. That this was a revolutionary way to work with images was realized in the early 20th Century already when collage/montage first made its appearance. Early collage artists quickly realized the power of their endeavour: armed with little more than a bunch of newspapers and magazines, scissors, and some glue they could subvert the societies they lived in just by making new images.

This mechanism still works, but it has become a lot harder because the goal post has moved considerably. It is one thing to make dada images in a world where television or cinema do not exist and where an imperial regime is collapsing. It’s quite another to do so in this postmodern world that is flooded by incongruous combinations of images on the small screens we hold in our hands every single day.

Everybody Dance! by Masha Sviatahor is the debut publication by Tamaka, a new publishing venture whose goal it is to showcase (in their words) “exceptional but underrepresented authors with Belarusian background”. The book showcases collages produced from source material found in Sovetskoe Foto, the Soviet Union’s photography magazine.

Looking around online to learn more about the artist, I came across the following, which — and this is my age showing — amused me: “It is interesting to mentioned that the artist creates her photomontages manually, deliberately abandoning digital technologies, which evokes the metaphor of the fabric of history.” (source) I suppose collage now mostly entails using a computer? And how exactly does cutting images by hand evoke the fabric of history? (I know that I shouldn’t ask too many questions. I will stop now.)

The materiality of Sviatahor’s work is enhanced in the book as well, with a set of spreads showcasing raw materials and cuttings. Earlier this year, I wrote a longer piece on the relationship between collage and what people call “generative AI” to produce new images. Without going into all of the details, one of the crucial differences is that with manual collage, you show your hands (or rather the outcome of what those hands did) — and that’s also crucial when you want to make art.

But this is a different world now, with digital technologies automatically assumed to be the default approach. That’s not necessarily bad, but it risks losing sight of some aspects that can be extremely important, for example when discussing collage.

Regardless, in her work Sviatahor moves between two poles. One pole is the one first established by Hannah Höch, where an artist distills a series of image fragments into something that takes on a life of it own. The other pole revolves more around graphic design than around art (not that graphic design cannot be art — however important it is, though, it mostly is not). In those cases, the new images appear to mostly live from their form: the way they are constructed.

I don’t necessarily want to come up with a theory of collage, especially since other people are much more well suited for this. What I will say is that I think that collage works best when you do not overthink things and when you allow yourself to find the right balance between the source material and your larger vision for it.

What I mean by that is that if you’re too worried about the overall organization of the frame, then that formal element threatens to overwhelm what a viewer might take from a collage image. In Sviatahor’s best collages, that’s not the case. There, the sometimes quirky, sometimes unsettling juxtaposition of images — or the deliberate removal of certain parts — adds up to something that gets at a larger truth.

For example, there is an image that shows former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (who like no other exemplified the rot that would ultimately take the system down) standing in front of a group of young pioneers. Sviatahor’s sole intervention was to somewhat crudely cut out the eyes and mouths of the children, resulting in a rather unsettling commentary on the Soviet system.

To what extent the book comments on present-day Belarus I am unable to tell. Before people realized who Vladimir Putin really is and what he aims for, the country used to be called Europe’s last remaining dictatorship. For sure, the country’s leader, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, is a Soviet character through and through. However, can collages made from Sovetskoe Foto speak of today’s Belarus? I’m not sure.

Or maybe they can, and I am unable to see it. But asking too much from a set of art works invites disappointment. So let’s not do that. Instead, I might as well instead focus on the book itself, a very handsome and ambitious production that holds a lot of promise regarding this new publisher’s future releases.

In the world of photography, there still are too many corners in the parts of Europe that before 1989 were either part of the Soviet Union or that were ruled by Soviet-approved puppets. The Iron Curtain might have come down, but I sometimes wonder whether photolandians located to the west of it have noticed.

Any exposure to the photography, art, and life experiences in eastern central and eastern Europe can only enrich our collective understanding of what Europe might actually be.

Everybody Dance!; collages/photomontages by Masha Sviatahor; essay by Maya Hristova; 164 pages; Tamaka; 2025

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Where do we go from here?

The following is a teaser of a longer article you can find on my Patreon. If you’re curious, there’s the option of a trial subscription. Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).

tldr: Photographers spent so much time and effort on making sure that their medium was accepted as art that they managed to discard vast parts of its potential, while locking themselves in an environment that doesn’t serve the vast majority of them well.

I should probably start off by noting that I actually like art (some of it, obviously, not all) and that I have no problem with photography as art (ditto). At this stage, I don’t see a point in rejecting art photography per se. Or maybe I should write “photography as art” because that’s a better way of understanding what I want to think about in what follows. After all, photography can be all kinds of things. It can serve to illustrate something (for example in cookbooks), it can be used as evidence (such as when the police will send you a photograph showing your car speeding), it can be used to augment information in some fashion (such as when newspapers use photographs next to their articles), it can be art (such as when you hang large photographs in expensive looking frames in a barren room that’s mostly frequented by the well off), etc. But photography also is a means of very basic communication. People — and by that I mean everyday people, people who usually have never studied photography — send each other photographs. These days, they often do it with the little hand-held computers that are being referred to as smartphones.

As a communicative device, photography is unsurpassed. Granted, it has its deficiencies, most of which are grounded in the basic fact that people see in a photograph what they want to and/or are able to see in it. But a photograph’s visual immediacy more than makes up for it. While you can read a photograph — study the way it’s composed and what basic facts it conveys, that read will always only be secondary. I don’t believe for a second that anyone is able to immediately jump to a reading, without having a photograph’s visual flash impressed into their brains. You do not get this immediacy with any other medium. Other media rely on time to achieve their ends. Photography not only stops time in its frames, it also is able to convey something on a time scale that’s similar to the short moment the shutter was open. I don’t know whether this basic fact already poses a problem for photography as art, but it just might. After all, art relies on someone finding the time to be exposed to it. Art is based on time and also space in ways that photography is not. Thus when you insert photography into an art setting, you already make it conform to conventions that (at least in principle) are somewhat alien to it. In effect, photographs in an art setting are usually made to operate like paintings, which, again, works well some of the time.

It was rather telling that when digital photography arrived on the scene, the first thing most art photographers did was to try to use it in exactly the fashion they were familiar with. The main questions were: how can we produce large prints that have as much detail as we’re used to? In principle, there’s nothing wrong with this approach (in particular if you’re interested in selling prints). But you could easily argue that digital photography finally realized the medium’s most inate potential, namely the ability to easily produce any number of identical copies of the same photograph. Shoehorning it into the old art approach threw that away. With digital photography, you can also easily create any number of photographs of the same thing or scene, which, it turns out, is what most people do. Again, this was something that was immediately discarded by most art photographers. On top of that, the complaint that there were too many photographs emerged — as if, somehow, there were a way to quantify or define what the right number of photographs might be. The flood of photographs, the talking point goes, leads to “us” (the assumptions behind the “we” here are never explored) becoming numb to photographs or to not fully appreciating something any longer. It’s really quite a reactionary response to what could have been an incredibly liberating moment in the history of photography.

And it was a liberating moment in the history of photography as all of those people happily taking and sharing photographs experience it every single day. The only people struggling with all of this were and are the photographers who consider themselves at the forefront of their medium: the artists (or photographers who think of themselves as artists).

There’s something incredibly tragic about the fact that in 1917, Marcel Duchamp put a urinal on a pedestal, signed it (“R. Mutt”), and that Alfred Steiglitz (yes, that Alfred Stieglitz) exhibited it at his 291 gallery, only to then proceed to treat photography not as something like the equivalent of the urinal but instead as something akin to painting. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to imply anything by equating photography to a urinal. It’s just that Duchamp picked a urinal, a mass-produced and rather mundane object. Photography itself can be mass-produced, and mostly it’s rather mundane. Prosaic even. Which, if you think about it, has enormous potential if you insert it into an art setting. But of course, the moment you try to emulate painting, you will have to throw almost all of that out of the window. In some grim sense, I have to hand it to all of those art photographers, in particular once digital photography became prevalent: it takes some determination to stick with a narrow convention of what your medium can do while camera makers put enormous efforts into demonstrating how outdated that approach is! And, to reiterate this yet again, that outdated approach can produce some good art, as it sometimes does.

But it often does not. A lot of contemporary art photography feels stale, rehashing the same ideas over and over again, using the same formats and approaches.

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