Takuma Nakahira, born in 1938, maintained a consistent stance towards photography; refusing to illustrate words and concepts with photography, and attempting to break this medium free from the reproduction of a priori meanings. With increasing attention on contemporary Japanese photography in recent years, interest in Nakahira as an artist who explored the radical possibilities of photography has grown since his death in 2015.
In 1963 Nakahira graduated from the Spanish Department of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and worked as an editor for the magazine, Contemporary Eye. From the mid-1960s, he began publishing many essays on photography and film in various magazines, taking up photography under the guidance of Shomei Tomatsu, who he met through his work as a magazine editor. The relationship between language and photography was at the center of Nakahira’s pursuits from the very beginning of his career. In 1968, he co-founded a photography coterie magazine Provoke, subtitled “Provocative Materials for Thought,” together with critic Taki Koji and others. Provoke’s photographs profoundly broke away from established photographic aesthetics and sent shockwaves through the photoworld that resonated with the turbulent time of the late 1960s. However, Nakahira would later deplore the fact that their work, often described as “grainy, blurry, and unfocused,” had become imitated and consumed as a style of design serving the techniques of advertising.
He published his first photobook, For a Language to Come in 1970. In this collection, Nakahira photographed the city at night or waterside locations, sensually capturing the unstable state of material things, intuitively responding to the dim light of twilight. In the title essay of the 1973 collection of his writings, Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary? Nakahira wrote critically of his previous works and chose to destroy most of his negatives and prints of his own work up to that time. Although he succumbed to an illness in 1977, he soon restarted taking photographs. Since the early 2000s Nakahira has received increasing attention, and a large-scale retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 2003 at the Yokohama Museum of Art.
Nakahira’s lesser-known work from other periods in his career are now gradually being introduced. This collection of photographs is an example of such newly rediscovered work. They were taken during his short trip to Marseille in 1976 on the occasion of his participation in a group exhibition of Japanese avant-garde artists. The photographs reveal Nakahira’s keen eye for the details of urban surfaces – pavement, wet road surfaces, reflections on show-windows – all grasped through his tactile sensibility of the streets. Some of these photographs were published in a magazine in the following year under the title, “The Streets, or Traces of Terror.”
His works are included in the collections of the Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama; the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Bombas Gens Centre d’Art, Valencia among others.
