In Iroha, Kazuo Kitai Turns Destruction Right into a Approach of Seeing — Blind Journal

What does it imply to destroy one’s personal art work? For centuries, artists have destroyed their archives—both intentionally, as a part of an inventive course of, or out of frustration with the work. Japanese photographer Takuma Nakahira burned his total archive in 1973, fearing it’d “descend into cliché.” American photographer Matthew Brandt submerged his chromogenic prints in lake water, letting chemistry and likelihood corrode the picture. For these photographers, destruction was not erasure however transformation: a deliberate act of reinterpretation that questioned the sanctity of the photographic doc. With Iroha, Kazuo Kitai joins this lineage, turning his lens inward to dismantle his personal archive.

Born in 1944 in Anshan, China, to Japanese mother and father, Kitai moved to Japan following World War II and studied in Tokyo. He is famend for documenting the coed protests of the Sixties and 70s, the Sanrizuka wrestle, and rural life. His work emerged alongside the experimental Provoke motion—which included Nakahira—a radical collective that employed grainy, blurred methods to supply a extra subjective imaginative and prescient of post-Hiroshima Japan. Though by no means formally a part of Provoke, Kitai shared their urgency and their refusal of documentary neutrality.

Now in his eighties, the photographer revisits his archives, unleashing their undiminished anger. The silver gelatin prints are torn and coated in paint splatters and calligraphic marks. We see closeups of protests and troopers, but in addition nonetheless life particulars: an umbrella, a boot. The violence towards the prints paradoxically offers them new poetic that means. The images depicting turbulence themselves grow to be victims of turbulence, earlier than being rekindled with care, gaining new that means as standalone artworks.

The title itself alerts this return to fundamentals. Iroha refers back to the first syllables of the normal Japanese kana order, equal to “A-B-C” in Latin script. Paired with the numbers “1, 2, 3,” they evoke a countdown earlier than setting one thing in movement. This shouldn’t be merely deconstruction; it’s reinvention. Kitai dismantles his archive to ask what stays when the documentary impulse is stripped away.

The intervention recollects different photographers who’ve used bodily alteration to generate that means past the picture itself. Brandt’s lake water corroded his prints in methods each unpredictable and important. Similarly, Kitai’s paint and tears don’t distract from his topic however deepen it. The violence of the gesture—tearing one’s personal work—parallels the violence embedded within the authentic images: our bodies underneath rigidity, crowds in movement, the friction of resistance.

Yet there’s something elegiac right here, too. The act of destroying one’s archive may be understood as mourning, not for what was, however for what the picture as soon as claimed to signify. By tearing them aside, Kitai alleviates the burden of illustration. The picture is now not fastened testimony however a floor, a place to begin for one thing else.

The photographs are impactfully printed, sequenced, and designed by Marseille-based writer Chose Commune. The format of the e-book—resembling a big protest leaflet, sure by a removable purple thread—reminds us that there’s magnificence even in seemingly fleeting and turbulent occasions, and that we are able to all the time revisit them and provides them new that means. Iroha is a manifesto in e-book kind, positioned on the intersection of documentation, reminiscence, painterly gesture, and renewal. It asks whether or not destruction may be a type of care: a technique to honor the picture by refusing to let it calcify into cliché.

Iroha, by Kazuo Kitai, is revealed by Chose Commune and obtainable for 42€.