Postwar Japanese Photography - Out Of Focus, Blurred And Rebelling

By Author: Olivia Preston
Total Articles: 3
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The chronological timeline of the history of art is literally dotted with thousands, if not millions, of movements, styles and fads. Some, like Impressionism and Kandinsky’s abstract art, change the history and course of expression forever. Others are lost, only to be rediscovered, re-referenced and revered as a short, but brilliant, part of history. Browsing those tumblr, flickr and photobucket blogs, one might be impressed by the odd-angled, blurring, action photography that some hipster with the latest SLR has uploaded, sharpened with the best in photo imaging program technology. Yawn! Far and above this form of art, one exhibition looks to remember – and thereby honour – a group of Japanese photographers who changed photography and journalism in a fundamental sense more than 30 years ago, at the same time doing what the hipsters did but just much earlier.

The exhibition is entitled Rough, Blurred, and Out of Focus: Provoke Magazine and Postwar Japanese Photography and will be held until February 27, 2012, at the Art Institute of Chicago. In a one-sentence nutshell, the work of Yutaka Takanashi, Daido Moriyama ...
... and Takuma Nakahira is examined, showing how their photographs published in just 3 years from 1968 to 1969 in Provoke Magazine started a visual and artistic revolution throughout the world. In many ways, the movement was the Impressionism of photojournalism: discontent with the strict rules of photography, where everything was neatly staged and in focused, the Japanese photographers felt they needed a visual voice to document the aftermath of the atomic bombings, American occupation, Westernization, urbanisation and rapid economic development.

Yutaka Takanashi, from 'SOMETHIN' ELSE' (c.1960)What was the philosophy behind such a radical new approach? For Nakahira, at least, it was the idea of photography as an equivalent of life; as much as he needed air, he needed to photograph. One famous quote features him propounding: “my photography is an absolute necessity for me, having forgotten everything.” This led him to famously create his visual diaries, which were hundreds upon hundreds of images – in a time of film, where time and development of photographs were costly, this style of documentary photojournalism was groundbreaking. As Nakahira noted: “I believe that photography is neither creation nor memory, but documents. The act of shooting a photograph is not something abstract. It is always concrete. No manipulation to make simple things complicated through conceptualization. Only the real I encountered through the medium of the camera is here in my photographs.”

While Nakahira may not have set out to change art and photograph directly for the sake of art itself, Takanashi certainly did. A fine arts graduate, his May 1960 one-man exhibition, Somethin' Else in the trendy and fashionable district of Ginza Garo set off a firestorm. The work featured photos of frontal images of buildings, shot parallel to the building being photographed. The work, which was hailed for its visual beatnik style, turned into a series that would mark the start of Takanashi’s fame, which eventually saw him become a professor of arts and photography at the renowned Tokyo Zokei University, along with winning the Annual Award for best photos from Photographic Society of Japan in 1984 and 1993. We’d recommend an image search of the names to appreciate the style they pioneered.

Olivia Preston is passionate about everything on paintings and arts. When she's not having fun she writes on oil paintings. For more information on and oil painting reproductions you can visit http://www.cheapoilpainting.com