Art Basel 2017 - Provoke Era
![Taki, Koji; Takanashi, Yutaka; Nakahira, Takuma; Moriyama, Daido, Provoke. Shiso no tame no chohatsuteki shiryo (Provoke. Provocative Documents for Thought) Nos. 1 - 3. [Together with:] Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o sutero (First Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty)] [Provoke 4 & 5]
1968 - 1970](/images/22611_h2048w2048gt.5.jpg)
Daido Moriyama
Nippon Gekijo Shashincho (Japan - A Photo Theatre), 1968
1749
8 1/4 x 8 5/8 in. (21 x 22 cm)
Tokyo: Muromachi-Shobo
145 black-and-white photographs printed in offset. Text by Shuji Terayama. Original green velvet wrappers, with printed cardboard slipcase. This copy inscribed by Daido Moriyama in black felt-tip pen on the front free endpaper (in English and Kanji).
Moriyama's first printed work is a milestone of Japanese photography. It was published the year after he had received the New Artist Award from the Japan Photo Critics Association for his series of images of street performers published in the monthly photography magazine Camera Mainichi. The book contains these images, mixed with street scenes and other pictures, seemingly chosen at random. The book is divided into two sections, each with introductory poems by Shuji Terayama. In the photographs, Moriyama has laid the defining cornerstone for his work that was to come in the 1970s. He is already experimenting here with the technique of “are-buro-bukeâ€, with its hard angles, and with photographs of photographs.
“He sought the world of the hipster, the freak, the “otherâ€, from the avant-garde Terayama theatre group, which featured nude women, dwarfs, and burlesque characters of all kinds, to the more vernacular nightlife of the city, the strip joints, gangster bars, and backstreet Kabuki theatres, a fusion of the old and new, high and low, insider and outsider, freak and non-freak.†(Parr & Badger).
These photographs of Kabuki performances and other actors are mixed with snapshots of ordinary people: office workers become featureless components in the artificial glare of fluorescent lights and synthetic surfaces; or with photographs of embryos in test tubes printed at the end of the book. By combining these disparate subjects, Moriyama draws attention to the process by which a subject becomes a photograph, and how the act of photography is a theatrical event itself.
[Ref. Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History vol.I, p. 288; Ryuichi Kaneko & Ivan Vartanian, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s, pp. 116-123]
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Shomei Tomatsu
OO! Shinjuku, 1969
1751
10 1/8 x 7 1/4 in. (26 x 18.6 cm)
Tokyo: Shaken.
120 black-and-white photographic illustrations. Original photo-illustrated wrappers, with text by Tomatsu printed on the back cover.
Despite the economic upturn of the 1960s, which established Japan as the third-largest economic power in the world, a fundamental opposition developed against the new political, economic, and cultural structures that had emerged in the post-war period in Japan. In 1968, the resistance manifested itself once again in university student protests against the pending extension of the “ANPO†security pact and the Vietnam War. This phase of the upheaval and alienation is documented by Tomatsu in his photo book OO! Shinjuku. A resident of the Shinjuku commercial and government district of Tokyo, he photographed the lives of the young generation and the student protests, which began in Shinjuku. Tomatsu's photographic sequences of anti-Vietnam protesters, strip clubs, and dark back alleys capture the chaos of Shinjuku in the late sixties, and illustrate the district’s central position in the mythology of postwar Japanese counter-culture.
[Ref. Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, vol.I, p. 290]
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Nakahira Takuma
Kitarubeki Kotoba no Tameni (For a language to come)., 1970
1753
8 1/4 x 11 3/4 in. (21.2 x 30 cm)
Tokyo:Fudo-sha.
103 black-and-white photographs printed using the heliogravure method. Text by Okada Takahido. Graphic concept by Kimura Tsunesisa. Original stiff wrappers, with printed dust jacket. Cardboard slipcase with title and name of author printed on the covering sticker.
Through his photographs and writings Takuma Nakahira was both the chief polemicist for the Provoke group and its political conscience. Along with Moriyama's Sashin yo Sayonara (Bye Bye Photography), his book Kitarubeki Kotoba no Tameni (For a language to come) marks the apogee of the Provoke period. It exhibits all the visual characteristics of the Provoke style, yet differs from Moriyama’s book in that Nakahira's sensibility is quite dissimilar. Being more political in his general outlook, Nakahira uses hidden themes to express his antagonism to the colonization of Japan by American consumerism. For example, Kitarubeki Kotoba no Tameni closes with several shots of the sea: a dark and menacing sea, a metaphor for social constriction and political claustrophobia. The other overwhelming metaphor in the book is fire, an apocalyptic, post-Hiroshima conflagration, often expressed indirectly in Nakahira's night pictures with swathes of burned-out lens flare.
[Ref. Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History vol.I, pp. 292-293; Ryuichi Kaneko & Ivan Vartanian, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s, pp. 130-135].
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Nobuyoshi Araki
Oh Nippon! (Oh Japan !), 1971
1754
10 5/8 x 8 in. (27 x 20.6 cm)
Tokyo: Miki Shuppan.
Illustrated with 225 black-and-white heliogravure-printed photographs. Design by Mikuo Nakamura. Textured endpapers. Original photo-illustrated French-style wrappers with elongated flaps.
First edition of Araki's initial conventionally published book following his early series of photocopy books. Despite the eroticism being more playful and non-threatening than is evident in his later bondage-obsessed books, Araki still to combat problems with the Japanese censors. Many of his proposed images were rejected. A compromise, at least in terms of Araki's original vision and imagery, was found with the development by Nakamura of a layout that split the rejected images into sections which could be reassembled by folding opposing pages together across multiple spreads. With the censors appeased, Araki was able to publish something close to the book he had originally intended.
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![GERIBARA 5. [Nobuyoshi Araki et al]., Mizugi no Yangu Redii-Tachi (Bathing Beauties); Benjo (Toilet); Five Girls
1971, 1971, 1972](/images/22734_h2048w2048gt.5.jpg)
GERIBARA 5. [Nobuyoshi Araki et al].
Mizugi no Yangu Redii-Tachi (Bathing Beauties); Benjo (Toilet); Five Girls, 1971, 1971, 1972
1757
7 1/8 x 10 in. (18.2 x 25.4 cm)
Tokyo: Fukushu-Shudan, Geribara 5.
Benjo: 104 black-and-white photographs printed in offset. Side-stapled in original photo-illustrated wrappers.
Mizugi no Yangu Redii-Tachi: 306 black-and-white photographs printed in offset. Side-stapled in original photo-illustrated wrappers.
Five Girls: 84 black-and-white photographs printed in offset. Side-stapled in original photo-illustrated wrappers.
The complete set of three books produced by Geribara 5 [The Diarrhoea-Shit Reproductive Collective of 5], a group which consisted of Araki, Yoshio Takase, Koji Yaehata, Naohosia Tabogami, Fukuo Ikeda, and Tomoko 'Miss Geribara' Kamiguchi, which flourished briefly in the early 1970s.
Benjo contains a series of photographs taken in Tokyo restrooms of the toilets and attendant graffiti. Each page of Mizugi no Yangu Redii-Tach contains three photographs showing different young women on the beach in bathing suits. Below each photograph is the girl's address and telephone number, half of which are allegedly made up, the rest genuine according to Shuji Terayama, who apparently tried phoning all of them. The last book, Five Girls, contains photographs of five models posing in various styles.
[Ref. Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, vol.I, p. 296].
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Daido Moriyama
Karyudo (Hunter), 1972
1759
Hardcover with authors name printed on the dust jacket. Comes with bellyband. 104 black and white photographs with a text by Tanadori Yokoo. Most of Moriyama's cult images are featured in this special monograph of the photographer's work.
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Daido Moriyama
Shashin yo Sayonara (Bye Bye Photography), 1972
1760
7 1/4 x 9 in. (18.5 x 23 cm)
Tokyo: Shashin Hyoron-sha.
137 double-page black-and-white photographs printed in rich gravure. Original wrappers, with printed dust jacket. Includes 32 pages of dialogue between photographers Takuma Nakahira and Daido Moriyama.
This is the most emblematic of Provoke photobooks, in which the aesthetic principles of the movement are best expressed. Moriyama pushes the boundaries of the medium: assembling images from a variety of sources, placing them in a discordant anti-sequence, with an array of full-page grainy, blurry, and sometimes indecipherable pictures. The images were further manipulated in the dark room, in a way that results in high contrast prints with a harsh coarse grain. This rough style became somewhat of a trademark and found wide appeal with a new Japanese generation.
Shashin yo Sayonara was produced as a result of a discussion Moriyama had with Takuma Nakahira in the Hilltop (Yamanoue) Hotel in Tokyo in August 1972. The two had been friends since 1964 and both had contributed to Provoke magazine. The argument centered on the function of photography to reflect reality.
“Shashin yo Sayonara (Bye Bye Photography) is the most extreme monument of the Provoke period, indeed it is one of the most extreme photobooks ever published. Daido Moriyama pushes both the form of the photographic sequence and the photograph itself to the limits of legibility, with a brilliant barrage of stream-of-consciousness imagery culled from his own pictures, found photographs—such as shots of car accidents—and images taken from the television set. Any notion of ‘good’ technique is thrown out the window. The pictures exhibit all the qualities of reject negatives discarded in the darkroom then retrieved from the bin. The photographic language is one of blur, motion, scratches, light leaks, dust, graininess and stains ... The pace is frenetic, the image bombardment never lets up, and we reach the book's end in a state either of breathless exhaustion or on an image-fuelled high.†(Parr & Badger)
[Ref. Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, vol.I, pp. 298-299; Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, pp. 218-220; Andrew Roth, The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present, pp. 290-291; M. Auer, 802 photo books from the M. + M. Auer collection, p. 543; Ryuichi Kaneko & Ivan Vartanian - Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ‘70s, p. 29]
Price Upon Request
Katsumi Wanatabe
Shinjuku gunto den 66/73 (Shinjuku Thievery Story '66-'73), 1973
1768
7 1/4 x 5 in. (18.5 x 12.8 cm)
Tokyo: Bara Gaho-sha.
128 black-and-white photographs printed in offset on yellow paper. Saddle-stapled self-wrappers. Shinjuku gunto den 66/73 was published in an edition of between only 500 or 1,000 copies, and half of those printed were lost to water damage.
During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Watanabe photographed the prostitutes, transvestites, yakuza (gangs), and revelers in Kabukicho, the red light district of Shinjuku. He earned a living by selling his photographs to his subjects, many of whom were regulars in the area, when he saw them on subsequent nights out, offering three prints for 200 yen. Watanabe seemingly pays special attention to the allure of his models, who in turn clearly enjoy being photographed. This particular mix of spontaneity and characteristic posing would have a definitive influence on a whole generation of photographers, including Seiji Kurata and Keizo Kitajima.
Watanabe's photographs constitute an important archive of Tokyo nightlife. Some are captioned with just the date and place, but in many Watanabe describes and identifies his subjects: “Someone I happen to see often in Shinjukuâ€; “Someone who works at nightâ€; “Someone wearing a wigâ€; “Someone who came in from Okinawaâ€; 'â€People who have been drinkingâ€; “Someone who works in the nudeâ€; “Homosexualsâ€; “Someone who diedâ€; “Someone who works in a Turkish bathâ€; “People jumpingâ€; “Someone who likes photos of himselfâ€; “3 guys who have been drinkingâ€; “Someone wearing silver lameâ€; “Someone who wants to become a celebrityâ€.
[Ref. M. Auer, 802 photo books from the M. + M. Auer collection, 570; Ryuichi Kaneko & Ivan Vartanian, Japanese Photobooks from the 1960s and '70s, pp. 140-43; Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History vol. III, p. 221]
Price Upon Request
Yutaka Takanashi
Toshi-e (Towards the City), 1974
1762
11 x 16 3/8 in.
Tokyo: Izara Shobo (self-published)
2 volumes.
Vol. 1. Towards the City
41.8 × 28 cm; 16 ½ x 11 inches
62 black-and-white photographs printed in gravure. Poem by Yoshimasu Gozu, notes by Takanashi. Design by Kohei Sugiura. Printed silver endpapers. Black cloth-covered boards, spine lettered in white, silver aluminum disk mounted to upper side;
Vol. 2. Note Tokyo-Jin, 25.6 × 18.2 cm; 10 x 7 ¼ inches. 54 black-and-white photographs printed in gravure. Black wrappers with printed label to front. Black paper-covered board box with printed paper strip to spine. Both volumes signed by Takanashi, the first in black pen, the second in silver.
Yutaka Takanashi was a leading commercial photographer during the Japanese economic boom of the 1960s. Towards the City spans the breadth of his career. Together, the two volumes document the effects of Japan’s rapid economic growth and the cost paid by the country as a result of this period of unbridled consumerism, where regional differences were rapidly evaporating, to be replaced by somewhat characterless urban centers.
In Toshi-e, Takanashi combines a multi-layered image of Tokyo and its inhabitants with glimpses of bleak, gloomy landscapes—generally without people—on which the city and industry have taken their toll. While the urban photos still adhere to the subjective documentary photography approach, the landscape images are wholly in the radical Provoke “are-bure-boke†style. In the January 1966 issue of Camera Mainichi Takanashi presented a thirty-eight-page spread under the title “Tokyoitesâ€, in which he attempted to capture Tokyo through a series of fragmented snapshots. Many of these photographs are included in the second volume, Note Tokyo-Jin.
Takanashi was a founder member of the Provoke Group, alongside photographer Takuma Nakahira, critic Koji Taki, and poet Takahiko Okada; Daido Moriyama would join them after the first issue of Provoke magazine was published. Toshi-e is “the last and the most luxurious of the group’s books†(The Photobook). The design is by Kohei Sugiura who also designed the deluxe edition of Robert Frank’s The Lines of My Hand, and Eikoh Hosoe’s Killed by Roses among others.
[Ref. Martin Parr & Gerry Badger,The Photobook: A History, vol.I, p. 302; Ryuichi Kaneko & Ivan Vartanian, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s, pp. 168-73]
Price Upon Request
Yutaka Takanashi
Machi (Town), 1977
1764
11 3/4 x 16 1/2 in. (30 x 42 cm)
Tokyo: Asahi Shibun-sha.
Full-bleed color photographic reproductions throughout. Bound in original cloth, with acetate dust jacket and a 12-page supplement loosely inserted; housed in cardboard slipcase with printed bellyband; design by Kamegai Shoji. The supplementary brochure provides photographic captions and a biographical profile of the photographer.
Immediately after the publication of Toshi-e, Yutaka Takanashi changed his style of photography fundamentally. Instead of the moving 35mm camera, Takanashi switched to a large plate camera. In his second book, Machi, Takanashi shows the vanishing prewar Tokyo. In precise Cibachrome prints, Takanashi describes the narrow suburban streets where old-fashioned wood and brick buildings are home to small shops and businesses. The book captures the charm of the old shitamachi (lower class) neighborhoods of Tokyo, here shown without the presence of humans. The change in photographic techniques is indicative of Takanashi’s rational use of the medium of photography. All of the color images were taken with a large-format camera mounted on a tripod often using extremely long exposure times (up to 20 minutes). Such a plate camera enabled Takanashi to create a precise document of what he saw, and to make time stand still long enough to gaze on the last remnants of traditional life and architecture, doomed by the breathless pace of change in Tokyo and Japanese society.
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Keizo Kitajima
Shashin Tokkyubin Tokyo (Photomail from Tokyo), 1980
1770
7 1/4 x 10 1/8 in. (18.5 x 26 cm)
Tokyo: Paroru-sha.
113 photographs, including some reproduced in color. Folded poster bound in at front of the book, with text and illustrations printed on one side and a large, two-color reproduction on verso. Original wrappers, with photo-illustrated dust jacket and printed bellyband.
In 1979 Keizo Kitajima, a graduate of Daido Moriyama’s class at Workshop, the influential photography school founded by Shomei Tomatsu, held a series of monthly exhibitions at Image Shop Camp, a gallery and forum he established with other members of the Workshop group after it closed. Each of the twelve exhibitions was accompanied by a publication entitled Photo Express Tokyo. Shashin Tokkyubin Tokyo gathers together images from the Photo Express issues into one volume, interspersed with color work not included in the original series of magazines. The work captures Kitajima's night-time wanderings through the underbelly of Tokyo. His style of photography seemed to exemplify an “other-worldliness†that was in stark contrast to the decorum of daytime Tokyo. "The combination of black and white with color is interesting, because this is a difficult trick to pull off. The tension between Kitajima's flamboyant, contrasty, edgy monochrome and his matter-of-fact, understated color makes this one of the most distinctive books in the wide bibliography on Shinjuku nightlife." (Parr & Badger)
[Ref. Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, vol.III]
Price Upon Request
Seiji Kurata
Flash Up. Street PhotoRandom Tokyo 1975 -1979., 1980
1773
8 1/4 x 11 5/8 in. (21.1 x 29.6 cm)
Tokyo: Byakuyashobo.
199 black-and-white photographic illustrations. Text by Takashi Ueno, Kazuo Nishi and Akira Hasegawa. Design by Akira Suei. Original wrappers with photo-illustrated dust jacket, clear acetate outer jacket, and printed bellyband. With the famous cover picture of a Yakuza, heavily tattooed and brandishing a samurai, on a Shinjuku rooftop.
Flash Up by Seiji Kurata is a photographic excursion into the seedy parts of 1970s Tokyo nightlife. Kurata, who began his photographing career doing workshops with Daido Moriyama and Araki Nobuyoshi, traveled through the nightclub scene of Ikebukuro and Shinjuku, photographing the tattooed yakuza underworld and violent street fights, and directly contrasting car crash victims with portraits of nightclub hostesses and ultra-right wingers of the Black Dragon Society. With this book Kurata earned the Kimura Ihei Award recognizing new photographers in 1980. Unlike the more expressionistic styles of his Provoke teachers, Kurata’s medium-format photos carry a journalistic clarity, and do so without sacrificing any energy or sense of immediacy.
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Daido Moriyama, Keizo Kitajima et al.
Image Shop Camp Vol. 1 or Last!, 1980
1769
11 3/8 x 16 1/8 in. (28.9 x 41.1 cm)
Tokyo: Camp.
Original photo-illustrated stapled wrappers
Although the Workshop Collective would dissolve in 1976, a number of its participants, including Daido Moriyama, Seiji Kurata and Keizo Kitajima would go on to establish a new alternative gallery space, Image Shop CAMP that same year. The group attempted to capture different snapshots of the working people struggling on the dark side of urban life. The impression of speed that these images communicate was also a feature of work at Image Shop CAMP where large-scale prints were projected on rolls of bromide paper attached to the wall, sponged with developer and fixative, and immediately exhibited. Kitajima’s yearlong series of monthly solo exhibitions at Image Shop Camp in 1979, titled Photo Express: Tokyo, proved to be a landmark series of exhibitions. As the title suggests, only this single issue of the CAMP gallery magazine was published, and its blend of post-Provoke images and graphic design attempt to capture the immediacy and thrill of the exhibition space.
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![Keizo Kitajima, Shishin tokkyubin Okinawa (Photo mail from Okinawa). 1-4 [complete set].
1980<br /><br />
1980<br /><br />
1980](/images/22697_h2048w2048gt.5.jpg)
Keizo Kitajima
Shishin tokkyubin Okinawa (Photo mail from Okinawa). 1-4 [complete set]., 1980
1980
1980
1771
8 1/4 x 11 5/8 in. (21 x 29.6 cm)
Tokyo: Parole-sha, January-July
Totaling 131 black-and-white photographs. Black-and-white photo-illustrated stapled wrappers printed in either light pink, blue, dark pink or green.
Encouraged by the reception to his Tokyo work, in 1980 Kitajima began photographing in and around the red-light district of Koza, a city in Okinawa situated close to the Kadena U.S. Air Force base which had been situated on the island since the end of the World War II. The military presence had resulted in a pleasure and entertainment industry evolved to cater to the Americans stationed there, which offered a marked contrast to the local traditional Japanese culture. Kitajima intended to publish these photographs in a series of bi-monthly magazines called Photo Express Okinawa, though only these four issues were realized before financial restrictions forced him to stop, and give up plans for subsequent series in Taiwan, South Korea, Hawaii, and China. Each issue focuses on a specific period of time: Issue 1, 15 - 31 January; Issue 2, 1 - 31 March; Issue 3, 1 - 15 May; Issue 4, 1 - 15 July.
Unlike the Tokyo series, Kitajima’s photographs from Okinawa were never collected in book form. There are no surviving prints or negatives, and therefore subsequent publications have had to scan the photographs from the pages of these four issues of Photo Express Okinawa.
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Nobuyoshi Araki
Shashin gekijo: Tokyo ereji (A Photo Theater: Tokyo Elegy), 1981
1774
7 3/8 x 9 3/8 in. (19 x 24 cm)
Tokyo: Tojusha.
Illustrated with 1045 photographs taken between 1967 and 1972, in both color and black-and-white. Text by Shunji Ito and Kazuo Nishii. Original wrappers with photo-illustrated dust jacket and bellyband.
Originally scheduled for publication in 1972, but not published until almost a decade later, this work is a visual compendium of extreme images of sex and violence (the book was never published outside of Japan). The variety of edited scenarios include many of Araki's most famous images, including those of his wife Yoko and also Yukio Mishima (Kimitake Hiraoka, an author). The themes of violent sexual practice, and in particular of bondage, so often present in the artist's work are captured through a combination of black-and-white and color imagery, with the use of both numerous close-ups and wide-angle shots, and ranging from staged interiors to landscape views.
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Keizo Kitajima
New-York, 1982
1778
8 5/8 x 11 7/8 in. (22 x 30.2 cm)
Tokyo: Biyakuya-shobo.
140 full-page black-and-white photographic reproductions. Original cloth, with photo-illustrated dust jacket and printed bellyband.
Kitajima spent six months in New York, roaming its streets and hanging out in its clubs. In the resulting book, he presents a vision of the 1980s New York in the vein of photojournalist photographers Weegee (Arthur Fellig) or William Klein. Kitajima’s images document both the chaotic street-life and underbelly of early 1980s New York. The publication is full of stark juxtapositions, capturing both the city’s energy and decadence. Flamboyant displays of outrageous behavior in nightclubs are shown next to pictures of desolation and dejection in the East Village. In New York, Kitajima’s work expands from carefree candid portraiture of the clubs, to a sober photojournalistic depiction of the seedy street life of New York, photographing the desperate living conditions of the impoverished American in New York.
For this photo book Kitajima received the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award in 1983.
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Seiji Kurata
Photo Cabaret, 1982
1772
8 1/4 x 11 1/2 in. (21 x 29.5 cm)
Tokyo: Byakuyashobo.
Black-and-white photographic illustrations throughout. Text by Seiji Kurata, post-script by Arira Hasegawa. Graphic conception by Tsunehisa Kimura. Original stiff wrappers with photo-illustrated dust jacket, and printed bellyband.
In Photo Cabaret, published two years after Flash Up, Kurata does not only confine himself to the dark underbelly, but embraces Japanese society in all its diversity, albeit with his customary dark approach. More gritty street photography documenting the seamier sides of the various criminal and sexual subcultures positioned in the margins of Tokyo nightlife is evident.
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Daido Moriyama
Calender Camp, 1982
1776
19 7/8 x 28 1/4 in. (50.6 x 72 cm)
Text de Moriyama Daido. This publication, the only one Moriyama produced with the editors of Camp, provided members of the Camp collective with an opportunity to pay homage to their mentor and inspiration: Daido Moriyama.
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