“What we photographers can do, and should do, is capture with our own eyes those fragments of reality that are completely impossible to capture with existing words and continue actively to create materials which confront those words and thoughts.” Provoke #2
Japanese photography in the 1960s flourished in publications and the mass media, bringing together photographers, editors and designers.
In 1968, critic Kōji Taki, poet Takahiko Okada, and photographers Takuma Nakahira and Yutaka Takanashi launched the independent magazine Provoke, with the subtitle “Provocative materials for thought”.
Immersed in readings of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre, the group wanted to liberate the photograph from the words and the “bourgeois ties” of the mass circulation magazines. In opposition to the engaged photograph, they reacted to the hermetism of the images and fought against the idea of photographic neutrality, proposing to confront even the forms of organization of society, the economy and the family. “Rushed, word-based solutions always contain lies,” cried out Nakahira, Moriyama’s intellectual partner in the period.
Moriyama’s first contribution was published in PROVOKE #2, under the theme “Eros”. It politicized eroticism, linking the material progress of society to fictitious cultural progress, which stifled sexual desires in exchange for the consumption of images. To confront repression was also to free the photograph from being a mere simulacrum of reality.
Moriyama published photos of a naked woman, whose sensual poses unfolded page by page. The sweaty condensation on the window, the hidden face, the half-light and the view of the bed reinforced the atmosphere of seduction and intimacy, while projecting the viewer into the scene, offering them the position of photographer or lover.
Photographs in mineral pigment, 2022. Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation Archives.
Provoke #2, March, 1969. Photos: Shibuya, Tokyo, 1969 Reproductions: IMS Digital Team