Takuma Nakahira’s Important Writing on Photography

In 1962, Takuma Nakahira mailed a letter to Fidel Castro, expressing his want to change into a volunteer soldier for the Cuban Revolution. At the time, Nakahira was majoring in Spanish and collaborating in numerous leftist examine teams about Latin America. In an article written about ten years later, Nakahira acknowledged that the reply from Castro’s secretary got here again: “We are more than capable of defending our own country; you should fight in yours.”

This early, maybe apocryphal picture of Nakahira however crystallizes a couple of key points of his work: a sustained curiosity in leftist politics, a area of view extending properly past the borders of Japan, and in addition one thing of an impulsive streak. The writings which are collected in At the Limits of the Gaze: Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira—the primary assortment of Nakahira’s essays to be printed in English—may be referred to as the results of the encounter between these expansive considerations and the particular medium of images. That is why, even at this time, his written work invitations us to contemplate images not solely as a artistic medium but in addition as a way of questioning energy.

After graduating faculty, Nakahira labored in Tokyo as an editor for the left-wing journal Gendai no me (Contemporary eye). This work put him in contact with main cultural figures of the day, together with the poet and underground theater director Shūji Terayama and the photographer Shōmei Tōmatsu. Through Tōmatsu, Nakahira got here to satisfy different distinguished photographers like Yutaka Takanashi and Daidō Moriyama, in addition to the critic and editor Kōji Taki. Soon sufficient, Nakahira stop his editor job and have become a photographer. Along with poet and artwork critic Takahiko Okada, Nakahira, Taki, and Takanashi collectively based the journal Provoke in 1968, with Moriyama becoming a member of for 2 of its three points. Setting out to reject established modes of images, the members of Provoke printed black-and-white photos filled with grain and distinction that pushed the bounds of visible legibility. While the novelty—and, actually, the interior consistency—of the journal’s images tends to be considerably overstated, Nakahira is greatest often called a photographer for his Provoke-era work, which he collected in his 1970 photobook, For a Language to Come.

In inventory

At the Limits of the Gaze

Photographs by Takuma Nakahira. Edited by Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard.

Description

The first English-language assortment of Takuma Nakahira’s influential writings on images.

At the Limits of the Gaze collects the writings of photographer and critic Takuma Nakahira in English for the primary time. An important determine inside the historical past of Japanese images, Nakahira is greatest identified exterior of Japan as a founding member of Provoke, the experimental journal of images, essays, and poetry, first printed in 1968, and for his essential photobook For a Language to Come (1970). Throughout a decades-long profession, Nakahira raised incisive questions on visible tradition and politics in each his images and his writing. As a part of a dynamic second of creative and political experimentation in Tokyo, he wrote on a spread of subjects hardly restricted to images: artwork, movie, journalism, literature, politics, tv, and extra. Nakahira’s essays brim with urgency, relentlessly interrogating images’s relationship to energy, the connection between language and pictures, and the gaze. As editors and translators Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard write, Nakahira’s essays “both suggest doubt about, and possibilities for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world.”

Details

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 164
Number of photos: 12
Publication date: 2025-11-04
Measurements: 5.2 x 8.2 x 0.5 inches
ISBN: 9781597115780

Contributors

Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015; born in Tokyo) was a photographer and author. He graduated from the Department of Spanish at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 1963. In 1968, he cofounded the journal Provoke with Kōji Taki, Yutaka Takanashi, and Takahiko Okada. His photobooks embody For a Language to Come (1970), A New Gaze (1983), Adieu à X (1989), and Documentary (2011). He was additionally the writer of many vital essays and books on images, media, artwork, and politics, together with Why an Illustrated Botanical Guide? Collected Writings on Images by Takuma Nakahira (1973) and Duel on Photography (1977). His work has been the topic of large-scale retrospective exhibitions on the Yokohama Museum of Art (2003) and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2024), and is included within the collections of different museums around the globe.

Daniel Abbe holds a PhD from the Department of Art History on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and is a lecturer at Osaka University of Arts.

Franz Prichard is an affiliate professor at Florida State University, writer of Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of Nineteen Sixties and Seventies Japan (2019), and has taught at UCLA, Harvard University, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Princeton University.

Related Content

For all the eye paid to Nakahira’s early images, his images apply developed collectively along with his in depth work as an essayist, critic, and theorist. Nakahira raised questions on media and politics in print at a feverish tempo, publishing multiple hundred essays between 1965 and 1977. The eleven essays right here, written between 1970 and 1976, present Nakahira testing images’s capability to assist reimagine how we all know and inhabit the world. They teem with the urgency of his historic second, because the Cold War performed out inconsistently throughout the planet and irrevocably reworked the Japanese archipelago. Nakahira was a part of a dynamic second of creative and political experimentation in Tokyo by which artists, filmmakers, sculptors, painters, theater administrators, dancers, architects, and novelists had been all engaged in discussing the connection between artwork and energy. While our choice introduces just one slice of Nakahira’s profession, the vary of venues by which these essays had been initially printed—a literary overview newspaper, an artwork journal, a jazz journal, and a images journal—exhibits simply how far past the boundaries of images Nakahira was pondering.

Born from this expansive second of artistic and important encounters, Nakahira’s writings developed by way of a ceaseless strategy of questioning, boring into the depths of particular considerations to pursue the contours of the world as an incomplete totality open to indeterminate prospects. Throughout the nebula-like relations amongst Nakahira’s writings, sure intertwined threads of questioning emerge. Each brings into view a special aspect of entangled issues and potentials. Readers will certainly discover their very own threads. To begin, we’d counsel the next three:

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from the sequence Circulation: Date, Place, Events, 1971

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from For a Language to Come, 1970

LANGUAGE AND IMAGE

Nakahira’s writings interrogate the discount of the world to representations of a human-centric outlook. To that finish, he questioned images’s position because the mere illustration of current language, or what he referred to as the non-public photos of artists. Nakahira wagered that since language itself had change into a code ordering the world, images had the potential to interrupt by way of this code and provoke, so to talk, new types of relation. Although he initially aspired to be a poet, it was by way of images that he got down to acquire a mode of language able to bursting by way of the static and dualistic schema of self and world that’s enshrined inside the bourgeois topic. Like many thinkers of his period, Nakahira wrestled with the restrictions of current leftist political vocabularies and conservative humanist orthodoxies that turned more and more divorced from the actualities of the grinding harmful forces of company and state energy. At stake within the evocative title For a Language to Come was not a self-enclosed system of photographic which means, however quite an encounter with the silences of worlds that had been rising from the collapse of modernity’s liberatory guarantees. Always pursuing the stress between picture and language, Nakahira’s personal images and writing hint the myriad types of violence—and transformative prospects to counter them—that give form to the world that we now inhabit.

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from the sequence Circulation: Date, Place, Events, 1971

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from the sequence Circulation: Date, Place, Events, 1971

EMBODIED GAZES

Nakahira related images to unconscious and sensorial points of human expertise, typically describing it in corporeal phrases. For instance, in “Why an Illustrated Botanical Guide?,” he acknowledged that “looking cannot happen apart from the body.” He constantly wrote concerning the bodily impact that photos—whether or not in printed media, on the wall, or broadcast on tv—have earlier than they attain the extent of cognition. And but, Nakahira’s essays additionally display that he was an especially cerebral author who engaged with the mental currents of his time. Why, then, this concern with the physique, not the pinnacle?

Several solutions are doable, together with Nakahira’s abiding curiosity in Surrealism. As “The Will Toward History—Surrealism’s Potential Power” exhibits, he was focused on reclaiming this motion’s zeal for the “twinned liberations of sensation and society.” And by occupied with the physique in political methods, Nakahira was actually very a lot of his second. After all, the energies of liberation that emerged round 1968 in Japan weren’t funneled towards slim or procedural political objectives. In a extra expansive mode, they held out the potential for rethinking the very nature of expertise. This was notably true of girls’s liberation actions in Japan at the moment, and though Nakahira didn’t critically account for gender in his writing, he was focused on embodied types of distinction. Perhaps that’s the reason, quickly after writing that “looking cannot happen apart from the body,” he claimed: “To look is also to expose the self to the gaze of the other.” In this manner, Nakahira hints that images would possibly immediate an embodied trade, by which the photographer should relinquish a number of the energy that may in any other case accrue to them by way of the digicam’s one-sided gaze.

Takuma Nakahira, Tokara Islets, 1976

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from For a Language to Come, 1970

LANDSCAPES OF POWER

The urgency of Nakahira’s writings speaks to the truth that he was contemplating images’s position throughout disparate landscapes of wrestle. For Nakahira, diffuse networks of the nation-state and capital constituted an emergent “landscape” of energy—a time period that he theorized in parallel with the activist movie theorist Masao Matsuda, and which seems within the essay “Rebellion Against the Landscape: Fire at the Limit of My Perpetual Gazing . . .” Here, Nakahira tried to suppose past city area, which he referred to as a “uniformly plastered-over ‘landscape’ sustained by power itself.” As the essay “The Illusion Called Document” exhibits, he additionally thought of the mass media itself as an surroundings of energy, noting {that a} weeklong, nationwide tv broadcast of a police siege on leftwing militants unconsciously reproduced bourgeois morality in its viewers. He introduced these considerations to bear on the tough realities of Okinawa, with which Japan had renewed colonial relations in 1972 following its reversion to mainland rule. Although Okinawa seems as the topic of just one essay included on this assortment (“My Naked-Eye Reflex—1974, Okinawa, Summer”), Nakahira’s later writings and images tackle the potential for working underneath and towards Japan’s extractive colonial relationship with the islands. He returns repeatedly to images’s position in each securing and unsettling capitalist modernity’s assorted landscapes of energy, and to their environmental and human toll.

While points of those three overarching considerations may be discovered throughout the work collected in At the Limits of the Gaze, it needs to be famous that Nakahira’s essays will not be the product of a complete system of thought. Nakahira was not a full-time critic, a lot much less an instructional of any kind. He was a working photographer, and the essays on this quantity had been written freelance. Much like his images, then, Nakahira’s essays may very well be regarded as performances in actual time, by which he responded to the particular context of a selected journal, its viewers, and the questions and sensations that struck him at that second. While they could not add up to an entire entire, the reader can join these completely different factors, like stringing collectively the celebs of a constellation.

This scattered high quality typically extends to Nakahira’s prose. His sentences generally tend to twist round themselves, turning into terribly lengthy, whereas others are brusque and uneven, for bombastic impact. Although we have now damaged up most of those lengthy sentences in our translation, we have now additionally tried to protect the rhythm and tone of his writing wherever doable. (While Nakahira by no means wrote a footnote in his life, for the sake of legibility we have now transformed his personal inline citations to footnotes. Any further notes had been written by us.) In an period earlier than phrase processors, Nakahira would have written these articles by hand, on a specialised form of paper referred to as genkō yōshi, a grid of small squares, every of which accommodates one character or punctuation mark; the sheets had been then handed over on to {a magazine} or newspaper editor. At occasions, one can think about Nakahira filling up the genkō yōshi, pondering in actual time, following his personal stream of consciousness.

Takuma Nakahira, The Streets, or Traces of Terror, Marseille, 1976

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from For a Language to Come, 1970
All images © 2025 Gen Nakahira and courtesy of Osiris

As traces of a lifelong apply of questioning, Nakahira’s writing emerged by way of a transformative confrontation with a altering world. After a fever-induced coma within the fall of 1977, Nakahira skilled reminiscence loss and partial aphasia that introduced an finish to his writing profession. From that time on, he continued to boost new questions by way of his apply of images, which he pursued for the remainder of his life. In his later years, Nakahira as soon as remarked that he smoked the “Short Hope” model of cigarettes, noting: “There is also ‘Long Hope,’ but now is not an age that seeks world revolution.”

The questions that Nakahira prompts might resonate much more acutely at this time, inside the cascading violence and disaster of this world nonetheless at conflict with itself. While the second of correspondence with Castro might belong to the previous, maybe up to date readers can discover types of “short hope” in Nakahira’s essays, which each counsel doubt about, and prospects for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world. At the bounds of the possessive gaze perturbed by his ceaseless questioning, Nakahira exhibits us different methods of seeing and sharing the world with images.

This essay initially appeared in At The Limits of the Gaze: Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira (Aperture, 2025).