The photographers of Provoke, a short-lived magazine that shook the Japanese art scene in 1968, wanted to “provoke thought” and denounce state violence. Their photo-political art succeeded in defining a combative community.
If one had to extract just one from the incandescent flow of images presented by the thick Provoke, it would be this one: Protest, Tokyoa snapshot that Shōmei Tōmatsu captured in 1969. In the uncertain halo of a whitish glow, a man is caught in the movement of his fall or his run, ready to vanish into the charcoal shadow that surrounds the photo. As if shrunk in the limitless space that overwhelms him, his body in full light seems disjointed. Suspended in the air or crushed on the asphalt, he is the living flesh of an unfinished momentum.
The image is unreal, which defamiliarizes perception. And the disturbance caused by its rough dreaminess, by its nevertheless brutal grace, expresses in my opinion the bubbling of a rebellious era (1966-1974) marked by the seal of anti-capitalist militancy and furious photographic activism.
In immersion
At a time when France is celebrating the May 68 revolt and the images that have established its myth, it seems appropriate to return to the events that shook the Japanese archipelago following the signing, in January 1960, of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, known as Anpo (abbreviation of Anzen Hosho Joyaku).
At the twilight of the Golden Sixtiesstudent demonstrations, general strikes and wild clashes provided the breeding ground for a generation of young amateur photographers whose anti-conformist protest was matched only by their desire for expression and quest for meaning. “As photographers, we must capture with our own eyes fragments of this reality that can no longer be grasped by language, and we must actively produce visual materials capable of arousing language and ideas,” announces the editorial of Provoke 1.
In the fall of 2016, THE BALL devoted a dense exhibition to this rebellious and performative photography, articulating both aesthetic and political questions in a tripartite installation – “Contestation”, “Provoke”, “Performance”. The catalogue takes up this structure to give form to the erratic proliferation of texts and images, and reproduces the entirety of the three issues of the ephemeral magazine Provoke which, between 1968 and 1969, shook the Japanese art scene.
Provoke. Between Protest and Performance is a fascinating puzzle of scattered testimonies that can be disconcerting, due to its scale and the diversity of the documents collected (photographs, pages and covers of books, magazines, posters, pamphlets and propaganda objects, video extracts, reports of actions or interventions in public spaces, interviews and scientific essays). Reproducing the revolutionary effervescence and the visual shocks of a photography carried by anger and disillusionment, the thick catalogue disconcerts, before absorbing us in its photo-political stickiness. The grainy glue of contrasting blacks and whites, their raw and blurred thickness – this famous are-bure-boke which made the aesthetic mark of these troubled years – and the blurred trail of lively and violent movements rivets the gaze. Impossible to look away.
Between the vertigo of loss, the initiation to a new language and the confrontation with the fleetingness of events as explosive as they are staggering, the reading is determined by the fragment. Various testimonies immerse us in the blind turmoil of the time. The overall vision is provided by a few exegetical articles that put the events into perspective and the works into context. All that remains is to find one’s way through the chaotic coherence of this plural and polymorphous production.
Because meaning comes from within, from the accumulated mass of voices and images. Impeccable illustration of works produced in a hurry by photographers and writers acting at the heart of the melee, in order to better question the world as it was going and to redefine the very ontology of their albumen medium.
Insurgents
Furtive images snatched from the heat of battle, the photographs of the demonstrators favor an immediacy that translates heated, nervous and epidermal reactions, to document a collective fight that sometimes brought together students, workers and farmers. The long struggle against the construction of Narita airport (1966-1972), which had transformed the Sanrizoka countryside into a veritable battlefield, remains the emblematic example of these epic confrontations, both on a human and symbolic level. Camera in hand, the students take photographs to show politics in action. They create protest books to inform, to denounce state violence and to represent what Duncan Forbes analyses as their “constituent power”.
In complete opposition to the social humanism of the documentary photography of their elders, the activists produce a mass writing, a writing of violence that accumulates a multitude of “discontinuous, arranged, regulated” signs and whose catalog renders all the intensity. Reading the raw documents offered – archives and interviews – gives access to a critical thought in turmoil, to debates that plunge us into a heterogeneous counter-cultural Japan. All bear witness to a photo-political gesture that calls for dialogue, the confrontation of points of view, the definition of a combatant community.
And each time, photography is put to the test. It represents the permanent becoming, capturing the trail or collision of bodies and things in motion. If it fixes the moment, however, nothing seems frozen. The images thus flirt with the indiscernible, they embrace the impermanence and incandescent fragility of a desire for revolution that is both hyper-stimulating and desperate. It is in this context of ideological agitation and social conflict that is invented Provokewhich draws on the sources of the avant-garde to free photography from militancy and create uncontrollable images.
City ragpickers
“In its essence, photography is a document,” writes Tōmatsu. “Photography cuts through the course of time. Instantly, the fragment of time cut out by the camera becomes the past, and by accumulating moments, photography becomes a copy of history” (p. 140). Witnesses to historical facts and archivists of a harsh Americanized urban modernity, the photographers of Provoke walk the asphalt to collect raw images. Brutal. They are the worthy heirs of Baudelaire’s rag-pickers, who go through “the archives of debauchery, the chaos of waste” to make “a sorting, an intelligent choice”.
Between effective capture and personal expression, Yutaka Takanashi assumes himself as both an “image hunter” and a “waste collector” (p. 460). Kōji Taki deconstructs all forms of composition to favor the fragment without framing or fixed viewpoint, in the vein of Robert Capa and William Klein. Takuma Nakahira questions photographic verisimilitude and, through his hallucinatory shots, questions the relationship of the image to the gaze and to reality. Attracted by the raw realities of the contemporary world, Warholian Daidō Moriyama photographs photographs. He produces copies of copies, to question the reality emanating from duplicated images and the relationship between the viewer and what he is looking at.
Contributors to the three issues of Provoke did not call for political struggle. Rather, they aimed to work on the performative shock of the image, on the awakening of a critical consciousness. Hence the subtitle of the journal, Matter to provoke thought. Between contesting the established order and visual performance, their images cultivate an aesthetic of confusion, in order to open the mind’s eye. Heroic rebels and vanquished by history, these photographer-rag-pickers put formal demands at the service of the phenomenological exploration of an overexposed and increasingly mediatized urban reality. Thus they work on carnal bodies (the second issue is entitled “Eros”), the language of the tested flesh. The adventure will necessarily be short and dazzling. Of an indelible virulence.