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Abstract
This article investigates how avant-garde photographers have explored the material dimensions of the photographic medium in postwar Japan. In particular, it examines the work of Provoke, a radical artistic group that collectively publicized a specific visualization of the urban landscape during the course of the late 1960s. Rejecting the complacent perspectives of conventional reportage and naïve realism, the Provoke artists attempted to construct a direct synthesis of experimental avant-garde and documentary practice as a useful method of social critique. At the center of Provoke's experimentalism there was an original discourse of document and documentation that brought about a new style of photographs characterized by their rough, blurry, and grainy imagery. Provoke's innovative conceptual approach and method of document creation was mediated through paper as a significant material support of the photographic image. Their experiments with paper brought to the fore the affective dynamics of urban forms, signs, and textuality, through which the artists were able to reflect a new ontology of the city in relation to the specific physical materiality of their documentation.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Hayashi Michio, “Tracing the Graphic in Postwar Japanese Art,” in Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde, ed. Doryun Chong et al. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 95.
2 The term kiroku can be translated as either record or document depending on the context. I chose document as it implies a wider technical and processual scope of material and cultural archival activity and creation, as opposed to a simple means of transmitting information. The meaning of kiroku in Provoke's work might be closer to Ronald E. Day's definition of documentation as a cultural technique within which the meanings of texts, images, and objects are configured in their relations. See Ronald E. Day, “‘A Necessity of Our Time’: Documentation as ‘Cultural Technique’ in Suzanne Briet, What is Documentation?,” trans. and ed. Ronald E. Day and Laurent Martinet (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 53–58.
3 Their vision of documentation is clearly articulated in the catalog of an exhibition that Taki Kōji and Nakahira Takuma participated in as curatorial staff. The title of this exhibition is “The Centennial Exhibition of the History of Japanese Photographic Expression” [Shashin hyakunen – Nihonjin ni yoru shashin hyōgen no rekishi]. It was held in the Ikebukuro Seibu Department Store for two months from June 1, 1968. See the introductory writing in the section entitled “Daiichi no kaikaki” [The First Blooming Period], in the exhibition catalog, the English title of which is A Century of Photography: A History of Japanese Photographic Expression in the Past 100 Years Exhibition (Tokyo: Japan Photographers Society, 1968), n.p.
4 Nakahira Takuma and Taki Kōji, eds., Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o sutero (Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1970).
5 This expression has been frequently used by Japanese photography critics, including Iszawa Kōtarō and Kaneko Ryūichi, in order to highlight the innovative aspects of Provoke's work in its influence on later generations of photographers. On the other hand, the Provoke artists often adopted the same expression to describe how the distinctive work under the banner of Provoke came to be continued, contested, or renegotiated in their later work. In either way, we can see how the Provoke collective made a huge impact – almost comparable to an epochal change – on photographic practices within postwar Japan.
6 This term was originally used in the “Provoke Manifesto,” drafted by Takanashi Yutaka, Nakahira Takuma, Taki Kōji, and Okada Takahiko in 1968. See Provoke 1 (November 1968): 2.
7 On these circumstances of journalism and the circulation of the images of the war, see Yuko Fujii, “Photography as Process: A Study of the Japanese Photography Journal Provoke” (PhD diss., The City University of New York, 2012), 118. Founded in 1947, Magnum is an international photographic cooperative that many important documentary photographers, such as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson were involved in. The focus of the Magnum photographs were on war, poverty, famine, crime, and family life during the Cold War Era.
8 Ironically enough, Taki, Nakahira, and Moriyama located the historical roots of their new vision of document and documentation within the archival photographs of nineteenth-century Hokkaido, the first colony of the modern Japanese empire. On their interest in the early documentation of Hokkaido, see Gyewon Kim, “Reframing ‘Hokkaido Photography’: Style, Politics and Documentary Photography in 1960s Japan,” History of Photography 39, no. 4 (November 2015): 348–65.
9 “Provoke Manifesto,” 2. For an English translation of this manifesto by Christopher Stephens, see From Postwar to Postmodern: Primary Documents, ed. Doryun Chong (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 214. I also referred to Miryam Sas's translation included in Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 186.
10 The title of this exhibition is “The Centennial Exhibition of the History of Japanese Photographic Expression,” which is mentioned in note 3 above. For more on Provoke's reconceptualization of document, documentation, and documentary photography, see Kim, “Reframing ‘Hokkaido Photography,’” 354–359.
11 Here Nakahira used Saussurian terms of “parole” and “langue” and defined the former as the world of physical voice, uncertainty, and physicality. The latter indicated, according to him, the world mediated through vision that continued to order and abstract the former. The ultimate aim of Provoke was to “achieve the voice [parole] of photographer.” See Nakahira Takuma, “Kiroku to iu genei: Dokyumento kara monyumento e” [The Document Called Illusion: From Document to Monument], in his Naze shokubutsu zukan ka [Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?] (Tokyo: Chikuma gakugei bunko, 2012), 56. The original essay was printed in the July 1972 issue of Bijutsu Techō.
12 I quote this expression from Kohara Masashi, “Shokuhatsu no kairo” [The Provoke Circuit], in 1968 – Japanese Photography (Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2013), 162.
13 Taki Kōji, “Shashin ni nani ga kanōka” [What Can Photography Do?], in Nakahira and Taki, Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o sutero, 6–11. For an English translation, see Chong, From Postwar to Postmodern, 216–17.
14 See Ivan Vartanian, “The Japanese Photobook: Toward an Immediate Media,” in Kaneko Ryūichi and Ivan Vartanian, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s (New York: Aperture, 2009), 12.
15 On Provoke's interest in the book as a physical object, see Kaneko Ryūichi, “Introduction,” in Kaneko and Vartanian, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s, 7–9.
16 Kaneko Ryūichi, “Photography in Print: An Interview with Daidō Moriyama,” in Kaneko and Vartanian, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s, 27.
17 See Jessica Santone, “Documentation as Group Activity: Networking Fluxus Performances,” in this issue, especially the section “Fluxus Documentation.”
18 Samantha Ismail-Epps, “Artists’ Pages: A Site for the Repetition and Extension of Conceptual Art,” in this issue, especially the first section.
19 See Lucy R. Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in her Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 [1973] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xi.
20 Ibid., xiv.
21 See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (1990): 105–43. According to Buchloh, the “aesthetic of administration” indicates how artists “mimed the operating logic of late capitalism and its positivistic instrumentality in an effort to place its autocritical investigation at the service of liquidating” (143).
22 For more details on Moriyama's idea of a photographic print, see Kaneko, “Photography in Print,” 27.
23 Fuji's dissertation provides a detailed analysis of the physical appearances, structures, and characteristics of the three volumes of Provoke. See Fuji, “Photography as Process,” 43–62.
24 See Vartanian, “The Japanese Photobook,” 17.
25 On the concept of remediation, I refer to Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 17. Her concept of remediation, or a double process of mediation, is based on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's discussion on the mutual appropriation and absorption of old and new media forms, discovered in the history of media. See Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
26 Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality, 7.
27 Nakahira, “Kiroku to iu genei,” 71.
28 See Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality, 13–52. Furuhata provides a fertile analytical ground for understanding avant-garde filmmakers’ responses to the political power of media politics. I refer in particular to her first chapter, on the intermedial experiments within avant-garde filmmaking, as a basis to develop my idea of paper and its material mediations.
29 Yasufumi Nakamori, “Decentered Voices: Post-Provoke Independent Photography Magazine,” in For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979, ed. Yasufumi Nakamori, exhibition catalog (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2015), 50.
30 Ibid., 50, n. 2. Nakamori explains: “In postwar Japan, minikomi, or ‘mini communication’ magazines represent a plethora of small-run independently produced, often community-based periodicals, which prefigured today's zine culture.”
31 In a similar vein, Jelena Stojković's essay discusses Nakahira's are-bure-boke photographs in terms of what she calls “urban invisibles.” See Stojković, “For a City to Come: The Material of Takuma Nakahira's Photography,” Lo Squaderno 35 (March 2015): 17–21.
32 For the discourse of fūkeiron, I refer to Hirasawa Go, “Kaisetsu: Fūkeiron no genzai” [Explanation: Landscape Theory at Present], in Matsuda Masao, Fūkei no Shimetsu [The Extinction of Landscape, 1971] (Tokyo: Kōshisha, 2013).
33 Nakahira Takuma, “Rebellion against the Landscape: Fire at the Limits of My Perpetual Gazing … ” in Nakahira Takuma, For a Language to Come, trans. Franz K. Prichard (Tokyo: Oshirisu, 2010), 10. Original: Nakahira Takuma, Kitaru beki kotoba no tameni (Tokyo: Fūdosha, 1970).
34 Tōmatsu Shōmei, Oh! Shinjuku (Tokyo: Shaken, 1969), back cover.
35 On the conflation of artistic practices and political conflicts situated around the Shinjuku district, see Kuro Dalai Jee, Anarchy of the Body: Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan (Tokyo: Grambooks, 2010), 482–5.
36 Tōmatsu Shōmei, text for the section “senryō [占領]” in Nihon (Tokyo: Shaken, 1967), n.p.
37 Considered one of the most important photobooks of the Provoke era publications, Towards the City [Toshi e] was published in Izara Shobō, Tokyo, in 1974.
38 Rei Masuda, “Yutaka Takanashi, Towards the City,” in Nakamori, For a New World to Come, 76. The original quotes are from Takanashi Yutaka, Raika na me [Like a Leica Eye] (Tokyo: Mainichi Communications, 2002), 72–3.
39 Nakahira, “Rebellion against the Landscape,” 10.
40 Takanashi Yutaka, “Tachiagaru fūkei” [The Landscape that Emerges], in Shin oku no hosomichi, gendai Nihon shashin zenshū: Nihon no kokoro, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1982), n.p.
41 Takanashi and Okada, “Toshi e,” 58.
42 Nakahira, Naze shokubutsu zukan ka, 23.
43 Ibid., 36–7.
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Gyewon Kim
GYEWON KIM is a senior lecturer in the Department of Fine Art at Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea, prior to which she was as an assistant professor at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University from 2013 to 2015. Within the context of visual culture in East Asia, her research interests include the history of photography, the politics of knowledge, discourses of the archive, and materiality, particularly in relation to questions of subjectivity. She has published articles in positions: east asian cultures critiques, Representations, and History of Photography.