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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