Related articles

• Japanese Avant-Garde | Tatsumi Hijikata (traceyfahy.wordpress.com)

All images © Eikoh Hosoe

Eikoh Hosoe’s long association with the revolutionary performance movement butoh came about through his encounter in 1959 with one of its founders, Tatsumi Hijikata. Hosoe collaborated with Hijikata on several series including Kamaitachi, which is acknowledged as the finest illustration of Hosoe’s hybrid photographic style, combining performance and documentary with a dramatic, virile aesthetic that embodies the founding principles of Hijikata’s ankoku butoh or ‘dance of darkness’.  The dramatic and intense energy that Hijikata generated with his dance not only captured Hosoe’s imagination but also opened up new ways for the young photographer to approach themes such as sexuality, gender and the human body.

Driven by the desire to re-enact his childhood memories when he was evacuated from Tokyo during World War Two, Hosoe had Hijikata perform kamaitachi, the legendary weasel-like demon that haunted the rice paddies in the extremely sparse, rural landscape of the Tohoku region from where they both came. Fusing reality (Hijikata interacting with the landscape and village people) and performance, Hosoe’s ‘subjective documentary’ series opened new ground in Japanese post-war photography.

Related articles

• Japanese Avant-Garde | Tatsumi Hijikata (traceyfahy.wordpress.com)
• In celebration of the yin of butoh (search.japantimes.co.jp)
• Eikoh Hosoe (hustlemagazine.wordpress.com)

The concept? A red line that connects us all in a graphical way, combined with our mutual love/hate feeling towards shooting a self-portrait. The red line forming an instrument to express yourself at that. Read more

Auckland, New Zealand (2006)

Prague Airport (2002)

Rotorua, New Zealand (2006)

© Daido Moriyama. Selection of images from the Provoke era.

Vol. 3 Provoke (Aug '69).

The image by itself is not a thought. It cannot possess a wholeness like that of a concept. Neither is it an interchangeable code like a language. Yet its irreversible materiality—the reality that is cut out by the camera—constitutes the opposite side of language, and for this reason at times it stimulates the world of language and concepts. When this happens, language transcends its fixed and conceptualized self, transforming into a new language, and therefore a new thought. 

At this singular moment—now—language loses its material basis—in short its reality—and drifts in space, we photographers must go on grasping with our own eyes those fragments of reality that cannot possibly be captured with existing language, actively putting forth materials against language and against thought. Despite some reservations, this is why we have given Provoke the subtitle “provocative materials for thought.”   (Nakahira & Taki 1968)

In November 1968, Takuma Nakahira and Koji Taki published the first volume of a magazine-style photobook call Provoke (intended for a restricted market with a common subset of interests, as opposed to general readers).  Provoke is the magazine most often associated with the generation of photographers working in the 60s & 70s Japan – even those that did not actually publish in the magazine. It is an example of a small, short-lived, but legendary publications, whose influence is still felt. Early editions had print runs of just 1,000. Investigating the relation between photography and text, the magazine was an artistic and philosophical manifesto, responding to the upheavals of the late sixties; inspired by free writing, Butoh dance of Tatsumi Hijikata, the experimental theatre of Shuji Terayama and underground cinema particularly the new wave films of Nagisa Oshima.

Participating photographers including Domon Ken, Eikoh Hosoe, Masahisa Fukase, and Daido Moriyama searched for a radical photographic language all hugely inspired by the raw, visceral style of William Klein’s New York (1956).  The aim of the magazine was to abolish the idea that photography is a document – ‘separating the photography from its socially prescribed function as a record”.  In doing so these photographers eliminated information, record especially narrative from their work to create ‘pure’ images’ (Kaneko & Vartanian 2009).  The images were often grainy and blurred (referred to as are-bure-boke; shortened to bure-boke) an aesthetic that implies a willingness to discard information.  ‘This drew attention to the photographic nature of a photograph, thereby liberating the image from illusion that it presented a reality beyond the physicality of the photograph’ (Kaneko & Vartanian 2009) thus challenging the commonly accepted idea of photography and to ‘provoke thought’.   ‘Photography here is not a source of information but rather a font of questions in pursuit of truth’ (Kaneko & Vartanian 2009).

Yesterday I was lucky enough to see Tatsumi Hijikata (1967); and the first UK screening of Tatsumi Hijikata Summer Storm (2010) at the Pump House Gallery as part of Art, Performance & Activism in Contemporary Japan.  This YouTube clip gives a sense of period I refer to.