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The Allure of Shashin: Japanese Photography from the 1930s to Present

Osamu Kanemura, Tokyo, from Concret Octpus (2011-2013)

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Hyperurban Symphony Despite the lingering trauma from war and emotional dislocation, Japan was soon invested in post-war recovery, accompanied by political unrest -- the signing of the US-Japan security treaty triggered large-scale street demonstrations and student riots. The 1960s witnessed social turmoil and a revolutionary current, as well as a radical shift of photography style. A variety of emerging photography communities expressed a desire to update the existing photographic grammar in response to entangled social realities.

In 1968, art critic Koji Taki (1928-2011), photographer Takuma Nakahira (1938-2015), with poet Takahiko Okada (1939-1997) founded Provoke, one of the most influential self-published photography magazines [1] in Japan. Subtitled “Provocative Materials for Thought”, Provoke publishes essays and poems that are featured alongside the photographs. In its first issue, Takuma Nakahira wrote, “How to fill the gap between politics and art? This is both an old and a new problem.” An open forum for serious discussions on photography began to form.

Provoke artists abandoned the established formal conventions and invented their signature style called “are, bure, boke”, namely “grainy, blurry, out of focus”. Contrary to social realist photography, they aimed to “create a reality predicated on an aggressive emotionalism and subjectivity [2] .” Their pictures seemed to be produced through “unconscious” lenses and display a sense of randomness. Daido Moriyama(1938-), who joined Provoke in the second and third issues, fixed his camera onto occasional encounters on the streets of Tokyo.

Featuring underexposure, his photos are noirish, dusky, tiled with thick grain, and possess hysteric and ghostly properties. The urban life, under his lens, is exhausting and dangerous, with secrets lurking behind. His lens is always after the unnoticed, and the way he worked with the camera is unguided.

The city has long been a primary subject of photographers, while “urbanization” is the most mediocre and surface theme. “Populous”, “metropolitan”, “modernized” -- Tokyo is more than that -- it materializes desire and anxiety, stirs up the imagination and frames the chaos into modern industrial order with a level of sophistication. The city is a living theater, while photographers are the choreographers.

As a prolific photography critic and art commentator, Takuma Nakahira photographed as much as he wrote. Dense in tone, his works are concerned with the everyday dynamic circulating on streets under the acknowledged influence of William Klein. He deemed photography to be a physical experience, an encounter and a reflective practice that possessed the potential to “provoke” language. This belief continued to sustain him after he suffered from memory loss and aphasia in 1977.

Instead of focusing on the density and kaleidoscope of the city, Tokihiro Satō (1957-) captured a void Tokyo where the crowd and bustle were removed by employing hours of lengthy exposure. In his light-speckled “breath-graph”/“photorespiration” series, the Shibuya crossing, known for crowdedness and consumerism, takes on an unfamiliar exterior -- the choice of black-and-white brings down the vibrance of shop signs, which renders it a static state that mirrors the streets where pedestrians and traffic seem to be evacuated. A great sense of emptiness in the city is lit up by the bouncing tiny light dots that hint at the presence of liveliness.
“It is a kind of monument of Japan’s rapid bubble-economy expansion [of the 1980s], and it is also a pulsating hub of activity in modern Tokyo. It has both vitality and ‘weight’, and at the same time it possesses a peculiar emptiness that reflects the post-bubble economy. In my image, the people disappear and the scene takes on these intangible aspects.”
Photography and Japan [3]

Born and raised in Tokyo, Osamu Kanemura (1964-)’s oeuvre underscores the claustrophobic anxiety of the city. The grainy texture of black-and-white film, paired with the heavy contrast tone, makes the cityscapes as a labyrinth of dark secrets. His choices of subjects are plain, but typical of a metropolis: the restaurant signs, the back alleys, the street stands, etc. Like Tokihiro Sato's works, these photos are devoid of people, some passersby are in the frame but never in focus. Kanemura regards humans as “a part of the city” and an element of photo -- just as normal as shop signs.

“Some photographers take pictures of cities that show no humans and the fact that none appear is somehow meaningful. But I have no interest in this kind of expression—the meaning that a desolate city suggests. I have no interest in photos that imply something. The possibility of the photograph that doesn’t imply anything, cut off from any implication or meaning. The photograph that has nothing hidden behind and shows nothing but the things captured. The photograph that does not seek meaning; rather, is disconnected from meaning—I consider the photograph to be something cut off from the world. Reality and the photograph are parallel. These parallel lines do not meet.”
Beta Exercise: The Theory and Practice of Osamu Kanemura

Unlike the previous photographers who chose to work in black-and-white, Takashi Homma (1962 -) shoots in color film. After graduating from Nihon University College of Art, he worked as an inhouse photographer at an advertising agency in his early career. In 1991, he moved to London as a photographer at i-D magazine.

In Tokyo Suburbia, Takashi zooms in on the detached mundanity that travels through objects in frame. Inheriting the aesthetics of New Topographics, the refined color and delicate details preserve the borderline poetics, standing as a contrast to the cityscapes under the lens of Provoke artists.