For a City to Come

The Material of Takuma Nakahira’s

The photographic apparatus is often perceived as an embodiment of a desire to see beyond Jelena Stojković is an art historian,
the limitations of human sight and bring to the view what is invisible to the eye. Photogra- writer and curator based in Lon-
phy is bound to invisibility in many ways, supporting a scientific aspiration to conquer the don. She completed her PhD at the
unseen, for instance, but also serving as a means of reinforcing it socially.1 Photography is University of Westminster in 2013
and was a Research Fellow at the
also tied to the city, and this relationship is among the longest standing ones that the me-
University of Tokyo in 2012-2013.
dium has been having since its inception.2 It thus seems that photography, the city and invis- She is an Associate Lecturer in
ibility form a specific triangle, of relevance when addressing the issue of ‘urban invisibles’. Photography at LCC, University of
The potent nature of such a three-fold connection can be observed in a large body of critical the Arts London.
writing and several projects produced by the Japanese photographer Takuma Nakahira at the [email protected]
turn of the 1970s. Nakahira’s practice departed from the candid street photography (seen, for
example, at the 1966 exhibition Contemporary Photographers: Towards a Social Landscape
in the US), and sought means to not only document but also induce social and political
change. Having a strong theoretical grounding in the specific discourses developing in Japan
at that time around the notions such as the image (eizō), landscape (fūkei) and materiality
(busshitsu), this practice is still significant to much of the present-day concerns with the
potential of visual arts to envisage and produce new forms of urban inhabitation.
In the third volume of the photo magazine Ken from January 1971, there is an image by Na-
kahira showing a processed strip of photographic negative rolled out in a sequence of black,
squared pieces of imageless film segments following each other in and out of the frame. It is
a part of a numbered Kodak safety film, cropped and enlarged by Nakahira into a fragment of
a presumably redundant and useless photographic material emptied of meaning. The image
bases on a double monochrome juxtaposition: the over-exposed shots are seen against a
transparent background of the negative but also contain in themselves the whiteness of
positive prints that their development would reveal.
Such juxtaposition evokes Guy Debord’s Howls for Sade (1952), a feature film constructed
entirely of similarly contrasted black and white screens, largely accompanied by silence.
According to Giorgio Agamben, it staged ‘the void where there is no image’, pointing at how
what cannot be said in a discourse, and is unutterable, can nonetheless be shown.3 Given

1 See for instance: Daston, Lorraine and Galison, Peter (2007) Objectivity. New York: Zone Books; Smith, Shawn
Michelle (2013) At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen. Durham: Duke University Press.
2 Tormey, Jane (2013) Cities and Photography. New York: Routledge.
3 Agamben, Giorgio (1995) “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films”, in Leighton, Tanya (ed.), Art and 17
that Nakahira accompanies the photograph with a title reading Language (kotoba), the same
relationship between text and image, what is ‘utterable’ and ‘showable’, or what can be said
and made visible, crystallises as its main subject of concern.
On the particular occasion, Language appears within a collective photographic feature titled
Manifesto.4 The magazine, edited by a different photographer in each of the three issues of its
short existence (1970-1971), continued to an extent the tradition of Provoke (1968-1970),
a historic publication best known for its treatment and presentation of photographs in an
abstracted and monochrome manner, dubbed blurry, grainy and out of focus. The subtitle of
Provoke read ‘provocative materials for thought’, and indicated an aspiration of photography
to make an impact on reality by provoking language through crude and bold production and
exhibition of images.
As Nakahira is considered to be the chief theorist of the Provoke group, the tension between
text and image highlighted in Language comes as no surprise.5 It communicates Nakahira’s
belief that there is not only nothing left to be shown but also nothing left to be said in the
historical circumstances following 1968. The uselessness and redundancy of the photograph-
ic material stands for the uselessness and redundancy of language from the title, signalling
its inability to articulate any meaningful, politically effective artistic practice at the time
of incessant domination of the capitalist media culture. As a matter of fact, Nakahira often
voiced out his dissatisfaction with a general ossifying tendency of language in his critical
writing, understanding photography to be inferior to language but also immune to its overall
petrification.6
Photography, for Nakahira, should thus aspire to perform a role of invigorating language,
bringing forth new ideas and concepts, and infusing different forms of perception. Such an
understanding of photography is insinuated in the title of his first collection of photographs,
For a Language to Come (1970), containing images previously published in various maga-
zines at the turn of the decade. However, unlike Language, which in this sense stands apart
from Nakahira’s main body of work, most of the photographs included in the collection offer
nocturnal views of the city, suggesting that photography should not only enable the arrival
of different language, but that such language is immanently bound to urban life.
As early as in 1969, Nakahira described the subject of his photographs to be ‘a bleached
street landscape seen on the surface where nothing happens, only a slice of forever unfolding
everyday’.7 This description aligned him with a nascent ‘theory of landscape’ (fūkeiron), evolv-
ing in the writing of the leftist film critic Masao Matsuda following his participation in the

the Moving Image: A Critical Reader. Translated by Brian Holmes. London: Tate Pub., 2008, pp. 332-333.
4 “Manifesto” (1971), Ken 3, 97-112. I rely on my own translations of the texts in Japanese for the development
of the argument in this article, unless indicated otherwise. I am grateful to Gō Hirasawa for stimulating and
making this research possible.
5 Provoke was founded in 1968 by Takuma Nakahira, Kōji Taki, Yutaka Takanashi and Takahiko Okada, and was
joined from the second issue by Daidō Moriyama. Published in three issues only, it was followed by an inde-
pendent volume First Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty: The Thinking Behind Photography and Language
before the group dismantled in 1970.
6 See for example: Nakahira Takuma (1968) Kotoba wo sasaeru chinmoku [The Silence Supporting Language].
In: Nakahira Takuma (et al.) (2007) Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga: Hihyō shūsei 1965-1977 [Fire at the Limits of My
Perpetual Gazing: Collection of Criticism 1965-1977]. Tokyo: Oshirisu, p. 89.
7 Nakahira Takuma (1969) “Tōjidaitekidearu to wa nankika [What is Contemporaneity?]”, in Mitsuzukeru hate
ni hi ga: Hihyō shūsei 1965-1977 [Fire at the Limits of My Perpetual Gazing: Collection of Criticism 1965-1977].
Tokyo: Oshirisu, 2007, pp. 60-61.
filming of A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), together with a group of filmmakers including Masao
Adachi.8 This discourse articulated a concern for the interconnectedness of the state power
and the expanded scale of capitalist urbanisation taking place in Japan at the time, and pro-
posed a radically anti-sensationalist approach to arts practice: moving the camera lens away
from the spectacles of violence favoured by the media (such as the intense student protests
simultaneously taking place in the country) and focusing on the quotidian and eventless
scenery of urban life. It was elaborated through a series of Matsuda’s essays as well as in
various round table discussions
in 1970 and 1971, taking place It is the invisible structure of urban environment – hidden
among visual artists, filmmakers from view in the same manner as the blackness of film
and photographers, including negative conceals the whiteness of positive print – that
Nakahira.9 disrupts the emergence of new forms of thinking, or acting,
In For a Language to Come we thus and thus causes any form of artistic practice to be either
encounter mundane city traffic, complicit or impossible
the commute, industry and com-
merce, anonymous underground
corridors and passages, back alleys, construction sites, close-up fragments of buildings and
roads, the periphery and the wastelands of the Tokyo Bay. Nevertheless, if we keep in mind
that the ‘theory of landscape’ is primarily disclosing how the state wields its policing even
when there is no visible conflict, these images claim such (invisible) practices of spatial
organisation as urban planning, sewage construction, and traffic regulation, to be intrinsic to
the state’s management of the urban environment.10 They are not disinterested portrayals of
the city’s everyday fabric but bring to the fore the networks of circulation – highways, roads,
and underground – that are fundamental to the transmission and distribution of goods,
information, and labour.11
The city, and particularly its generally invisible flip side, becomes the chief component in the
elaboration of the theory, and features heavily in both Matsuda’s writing and Nakahira’s pho-
tographs, to an extent that we also come to think that an implied meaning of the 1970 col-
lection could be For a City to Come. The ‘imageless’ character of Language, in such a manner,
could be read as a proposition that it is the invisible structure of urban environment – hidden
from view in the same manner as the blackness of film negative conceals the whiteness of
positive print – that disrupts the emergence of new forms of thinking, or acting, and thus
causes any form of artistic practice to be either complicit or impossible. Nakahira, however,
embraces this impossibility in his work, which becomes a quest for the way forward in the
conditions that inescapably render any antagonism inoperative. It is by no coincidence that
in For a Language to Come Nakahira draws heavily on the tension between deep shadow and
bright light (opacity and transparency, or visibility and invisibility), attempting to ‘crack’ (the

8 For how Nakahira ‘predestined’ the filming of A.K.A. Serial Killer with this text see: Matsuda Masao (1971)
“Fūkeiron no kitten [The Base of Landscape Theory]”, in Fūkei no shimetsu [The Extinction of Landscape]. Tokyo:
Koshisha, 2013, p. 307. For a thorough discussion of the ‘theory of landscape’ see: Furuhata, Yuriko (2007)
“Returning to Actuality: Fūkeiron and the Landscape Film”, Screen, 48(3), 345-362.
9 See for instance “Fūkei wo megutte [On Landscape]” (1970), in Shashin eizō [Photo Image] 6, 118-34. As this
round table discussion made clear, the theory also evolved counter inadequacy of the word ‘situation’, prevailing
in the discourse previously.
10 Furuhata, Yuriko (2013) Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image
Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 138-139.
11 Ibid. p. 144. 19
appearance of) the city open with his camera flash.12 Such ‘cracks’ (in the state of things, in
the state of places, in the state of norms), as Félix Guattari reminds us, are never passively
experienced, and are aimed towards the advent of new social practices, undivided from each
other.13
Nakahira’s interest in the city extends across but also beyond his involvement with both
Provoke and the ‘theory of landscape’.14 From 1971 (the year in which he dissociated himself
from the theory) through to 1973 he published a number of photographs titled ‘City’ in vari-
ous magazines, in parallel to a project he called Botanical Dictionary, articulated in a collec-
tion of essays Why a Botanical Dictionary (1973). Formally, the only innovation introduced in
this project was the use of colour, as the photographs again show the same type of disjointed
and indistinct urbanity, sometimes even repeating previous, monochrome images. Concep-
tually, the shift in focus from ‘landscape’ to ‘dictionary’ was articulated as aiming to produce
a series of views of the city that would be purged of all subjectivity of the photographer and
would compile its singular elements so as to potentially reveal new connections between
them.15 In this approach Nakahira is substantially led by his interest in the French writer and
filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, the chief theorist of the ‘new novel’. Robbe-Grillet is best
known for an attempt to shift the focus of artistic attention to objects, in both his novels and
films, treating the ‘surface’ appearance of things as the only substance available to contem-
plation. As Roland Barthes puts it, description for Robbe-Grillet is always ‘anthological’, and
presents the object as if it were in itself a spectacle, demanding our attention regardless of its
relation to the dialectic of the story, by simply being there.16
In Nakahira’s case, the ‘anthological’ approach allows his photographs to show their subject
matter as impartial slices of reality, not pertaining to a specific subjectivity, expression or
symbolic meaning but acting as an archive of the photographic material, awaiting for its
referential point ‘to come’ in the slow unfolding of time. They not only reveal the invisible
structures and systems of governmental control imprinted on the urban landscape but aim to
deconstruct and reconfigure their perception. The connection between photography, the city,
and invisibility in the material of Nakahira’s photography thus encapsulates an active pro-
cess of exchange and interrelation, in which photography not only brings invisibility to the
view but also intends to trigger different forms of conceptual thinking through its particular
affiliation with language.
The photographic process used in this ambition relies on deliberate exposure to and
confrontation with the city, achieved by intense looking through the viewfinder, and aims to
‘bring back’ the records of this confrontation, attained through the objectifying function of
the camera. These records, however, do not simply ‘mirror’ or replicate the city, visualise or
evidence its nature, but function as non-verbal components of its de-structuring. To return to

12 Nakahira Takuma (1970) “Rebellion Against the Landscape: Fire at the Limits of my Perceptual Gazing…”, in
For a Language to Come. Translated by Franz Prichard. Tokyo: Oshirisu, 2010, p. 9.
13 Guattari, Félix (1987) “Cracks in the Street”, Flash Art 135, p. 85.
14 In 1971, Nakahira participated at the Seventh Paris Biennial, producing a body of work entirely focusing on
the city under a title “Circulation: Date, Place, Events”, which is another project worth noting in this sense. See:
Abbe, Dan (2013). “Fragments of 1971 Paris, On View Today in New York”, American Photo Magazine, at http://
www.americanphotomag.com/photo-gallery/2013/06/fragments-paris-1971-on-view-today-new-york.
15 Takuma, Nakahira ([1973] 2006) “Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?”, in Vartanian, Ivan (et al.), Setting
Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers. New York: Aperture, 2006, p. 130.
16 Barthes, Roland (1965) “Objective Literature: Allain Robbe-Grillet”, in Robbe-Grillet, Alain (1965). Two
Novels. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, p. 12.
Agamben’s analysis of Debord’s film, the image ‘does not disappear in what it makes visible’,
but shows itself as such, in its particular materiality.17 Nakahira explores what this materiality
might be, but does not prescribe a definitive answer.18 He rather leaves us with a question as
to whether it is only through its material presence that photography can have an impact on
the city, functioning as an equal component of the social practices and discursive relations
that constitute it.

17 Agamben, Giorgio (1995), p. 333.