NAKAHIRA, Takuma

Further informations about the work of Takuma NAKAHIRA

While working on Provoke, Takuma NAKAHIRA published his first photobook, 'For a Language to Come' (Kitarubeki kotoba no tame ni), which has been described as a masterpiece of reductionism. The cultural historian F. Prichard reads the book as intimately concerned with the social circumstances of 1970s Tokyo by considering the volume's relationship Nakahira's perspective on fukei-ron (landscape discourse). In 1971, fellow Provoke alum and Japanese commissioner for the 7th Paris Biennial Okada Takahiko invited him to participate in the international event. Rather than showing existing work at this prominent platform, Takuma NAKAHIRA chose to create an entirely new work based on his encounter with Paris, entitled 'Circulation: Date Place, Event' (published in 2012 as a photo volume). Over the course of a week, he shot approximately two hundred images per day, developing them as 8 x 10 prints and hanging them in the exhibition space while they were still wet.
By the time he published 'Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary' (Naze, shokubutsu zukan ka) in 1973. He had definitively shifted away from the style of are, bure, boke and was instead moving towards a type of catalog photography stripped of the sentimentality of handheld photography, a photography resembling the illustrations of reference books. The book itself combined photographs he had previously published in other periodicals from 1971 to 1973 with texts written between 1967 and 1972. The 1974 installation 'Overflow' (Hanran, a homonym for 'revolt'), which was produced as he was assembling 'Why and Illustrated Botanical Dictionary' marks his first use of color photography in a museum installation and as a continuation of the methodology of 'Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary'. Sometime after, in the mid-1970s, he decided to mark the transition in his approach by burning most of the negatives of his earlier work, save those for Circulation. From 1974 he began photographing in Okinawa, the Amami Islands, and Tokara Islands, all to the south of mainland Japan. From 1976 he further undertook projects photographing Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, Spain and Morocco. One point of reference for his interest in these subjects were the Yaponesia essays by Amami-based Tohoku writer Toshio Shimao. Shimao's essays, though sometimes overly reliant on stereotypes of the south, proposed thinking of Japan as connected to Southeast Asia rather than mainland Asia. These ideas proved influential not only for him, but also for Shōmei TOMATSU, who was also photographing Okinawa around this time, and the Japanese documentary film collective Nihon Documentarist Union.
n 1977, at the age of 39, Takuma NAKAHIRA suffered alcohol poisoning and fell into a coma. As a result of this trauma, he suffered permanent memory loss and aphasia, effectively ending his prolific writings. This event has also conventionally been understood as marking a change in his photographic practice since, after a hiatus from his image making activities, he returned to the medium in a style quite distinct from that for which he was known. His post-1977 photographs were collected in three photobooks: 'A New Gaze' (1983), 'Adieu à X' (1989), and 'Hysteric Six Nakahira Takuma' (2002).