In 1968 Nakahira co-founded Provoke, the short-lived but influential photography journal that revolutionized photography in Japan. Nakahira, who had been mentored by the master Shōmei Tōmatsu, deviated from the reigning social realism popular in Japan and, with his Provoke colleagues, advocated an expressionistic style known in Japan as are, bure, boke (rough, blurry, and out of focus). Nakahira and his colleagues were interested in the intersection of photography and language—in the first issue of Provoke in November 1968 they declared: “The image itself is not an idea . . . we as photographers must capture with our own eyes fragments of reality that can no longer be grasped through existing language.” This interest was further developed in Nakahira’s first book, For a Language to Come, published in 1970 and a landmark publication of postwar Japanese photography.

Nakahira’s career as a photographer is fractured and somewhat difficult to assess, as most of his negatives and prints have been destroyed. His controversial project for the 7th Paris Biennale in 1971 is among his best work, and, luckily, a large portion of it still exists today. This piece consists of more than 1,500 photographs, which he shot, developed, and then exhibited without omission over the course of seven consecutive days. These gritty chiaroscuro pictures offer glimpses of his daily wanderings around Paris, including strangers passing on the street, displays in shop windows, close-ups of movie posters and signs, Metro platforms, and his own breakfasts. As the walls of the exhibition space became filled with photographs, the artist began to spread prints onto the floor. Unfortunately, a disagreement with the exhibition organizers forced Nakahira to cut short his project, and a few years later he destroyed most of his earlier negatives and prints. For unknown reasons, most of the negatives from the 1971 Paris Biennial project were preserved. The gelatin silver prints available today were printed in 2013 in Tokyo, overseen by master printer and photographer Osamu Kanemura, from the original 35mm black-and-white negatives. MoMA recently acquired a selection of new prints, which evoke the spirit of the 1971 biennial exhibition—they are reproduced here.

Nakahira‘s project for the biennial reveled in chaos—he presented a world of unedited images, in which the accumulation of images was perhaps more important than any single picture. Viewers found themselves stepping into his world, and within the cacophony of the installation, they caught glimpses of its maker’s quotidian rituals. While certainly Nakahira’s project is a far cry from today’s obsessive documentation of minutia on social media, his unedited approach to image making and his investment in questioning the role of photography were signals of things to come.

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From 1953 to 1954, Izawa Takumi, a young editor at the popular weekly magazine Asahi Graph (often compared to Life), commissioned artists to design images for publication in the magazine. The artists, who included the core members of Jikken Kobo, made sculptural environments incorporating the letters of the magazine’s English-language acronym, APN (Asahi Picture News). The sculptures were then photographed and published as lead images for the magazine’s featured columns. Asahi Graf assigned two photographers, Otsuji Kiyoji and Kitadai, to collaborate with other artists, including Yamaguchi, Komai Tetsuro, and Teshigahara Sofu, to produce photographs for the publication. The APN portfolios feature a selection from the images that were produced during this vital period and show objects made by Yamaguchi and Kitadai photographed by Otsuji and Kitadai. The photographs are experimental in nature, radical in their composition, and bear the formal hallmarks of the artists’ works in other media. They represent some of the most interesting avant-garde accomplishments in postwar Japan.

Yamaguchi, one of Jikken Kobo’s co-founders, likened the workshop to “Bauhaus without a building” He was particularly influenced by Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy’s seminal publication The New Vision, but the group also took inspiration from pre-war European and American movements such as Constructivism, Cubism, and Surrealism, as well as from John Cage’s compositions, Martha Graham’s choreography, and Alexander Calder’s mobiles. Although influenced by the Western avant-garde, Jikken Kobo incorporated new technologies to create signature works relating to the specific conditions of 1950s Japan, which was undergoing rapid industrialization and modernization.

The two APN portfolios, published by Tokyo Publishing House, were acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 2011 as a direct result of curatorial travel to Japan through the C-MAP initiative. Since Jikken Kobo was primarily involved with stage productions, slide shows, and theater presentations, much of what they made was ephemeral or exists mostly in Japanese collections. These modern prints are a critical visual representation of the style of the group and bear witness to their multifaceted activities. MoMA has strong holdings of postwar Japanese photography due to the landmark exhibition New Japanese Photography, which was presented at the Museum in 1974. The show featured the work of luminaries such as Moriyama Daido, Tomatsu Shomei, and Hosoe Eikoh. The APN portfolios represent a different photographic tradition and are a vital link to the European avant-garde—the very foundation of MoMA’s collection.

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