About Japanese photographer, Takuma NAKAHIRA (中平 卓馬, 1938-2015)

Born in Tokyo, Takuma NAKAHIRA attended the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, from which he graduated in 1963. He began working as an editor at the art magazine 'Contemporary view' (Gendai no me), during which time he published his work under the pseudonym of Akira Yuzuki (柚木明). Two years later, he left the magazine in order to help organize the major 1968 exhibition 'One Hundred Years of Photography. The History of Japanese Photographic Expression' at the invitation of Shōmei TOMATSU. In 1968, he and photo critic Koji Taki teamed up with Yutaka TAKANASHI, and critic Takahiko Okada, to found the magazine 'Provoke'. By the second issue, Daidō MORIYAMA had joined the group, but Provoke ceased publication with its third issue. The Provoke members were well known for what was termed their "are, bure, boke" (rough, blurry, and out of focus) style, associated with spontaneity and thus supposedly a more direct confrontation with reality in that it would circumvent conscious control.

Photo books by as well as with works by Takuma NAKAHIRA

'Provoke magazine' (1968-1970, complete reissue 2018); 'Kitarubeki kotoba no tame ni / For a Language to Come' (1970, 2010); 'Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary' (Naze, shokubutsu zukan ka, 1973); 'A New Gaze' (1983), 'Adieu à X' (1989); 'The Japanese Box. Facsimile reprint of six rare photographic publications of the Provoke era' (2001); 'Tokyo' (2018, facsimile version); 'Hysteric Six' (2002); 'Degree Zero. Yokohama' (2003); 'Toshi fūkei zukan (都市 風景 図鑑, 2011); 'Takuma Nakahira Documentary' (2011); 'Circulation: Date, Place, Events ( サーキュレーション : 日付、場所、行為, 2012); 'Okinawa shashinka shirīzu Ryūkyū retsuzō #8' (沖縄写真家シリーズ 琉球烈像 第8巻 沖縄・奄美・吐カ喇 1974-1978, 2012); 'Overflow' (氾濫, 2018);

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'Provoke. Between Protest and Performance ', accompanied the first exhibition as a catalog, which was shown through the magazine and the photographers involved - Daido MORIYAMA, Takuma NAKAHIRA, Yutaka TAKANASHI - and determines its historical relevance.
280,00 € *
HC (no dust jacket, as issued), 21 x 30 x 1,5 cm., 160 pp., 100 duotone b/w ills., text language: English (in an additional text booklet)
0,00 € *
Pb. with dust jacket, 24,5 x 29,5 x 2,5 cm. (10 x 11,5 x 1 in.), 288 pp., 218 b/w & color ills., 1,600 gr., text language: English
98,00 € *
Pb. (no dust jacket, as issued), 26 x 36,5 cm., 64 pp., color ills., bilingual text: English / Japanese
42,00 € * Weight 0.5 kg
'Toshi fuukei zukan/City Landscapes Photo Book. 1964-1982' contains magazine works by Takuma NAKAHIRA. On display are his works published in major photography magazines between 1964 and 1982. An aid to understanding the golden age of Japanese photography.
0,00 € * Weight 1.6 kg
The facsimile editions of 'Provoke', one of the most influential magazines of the 1960s by the photographers MORIYAMA, NAKAHIRA and TAKANASHI, have been republished here in their original size as well as the texts by Takahiko Okada in English and Chinese.
0,00 € *
Slip cased pb., 21 x 14,5 x 2 cm., 320 pp., 257 b/w ills., text language: Japanese
98,00 € *
The out-of-print photo book compendium 'Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s' by Kaneko & Vartanian presents relevant publications of that era. Some of the most influential works and forgotten gems are presented and placed in a sociological context.
498,00 € * Weight 1.7 kg
'Photographers A-Z' brings together photographers who have made a significant contribution to photographic culture, as well as the most important photographic volumes of the past century. The entries are illustrated with facsimiles from books & magazines.
from 16,00 €

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).