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Now and Then, Japanese Photography and Art

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NOW AND THEN
Don’t Follow the Wind, Leiko Ikemura, Rinko Kawauchi, Ken Kitano, Tatsuo Miyajima, Daido Moriyama, Asako Narahashi, Mika Ninagawa, Lieko Shiga, Issei Suda, Yutaka Takanashi, Shomei Tomatsu and others

Dezember 5th, 2015 – January 23rd, 2016

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| EN

“NOW AND THEN” is the second exhibition in the new rooms of | PRISKA PASQUER. It is devoted to Japanese photography and art.

The exhibition brings together a number of different eras and media. Classical positions of Japanese post-war photography rub shoulders with the studious shots of Rinko Kawauchi; the bright pop aesthetic of Mika Ninagawa collides with the raw imagery of “Provoke” protagonists Daido Moriyama and Yutaka Takanashi; Leiko Ikemura’s contemporary painting is juxtaposed with a digital LED installation by Tatsuo Miyajima. On a thematic level, “NOW AND THEN” casts an eye on Japanese society. Past, present and future, changes and threats, possibilities and defeats are viewed from a wide variety of perspectives. As different as the artistic positions are, they all share a peculiarly Japanese approach to dealing with reality: the artists do not attempt to pigeon-hole what they find, but rather approach reality with a high degree of openness. This approach gives rise to a unique aesthetic. An aesthetic that toys with the visible and invisible, always referencing more than can be seen in the picture.

At the same time, all artists deal with very specific themes – always rupture, transition and change. These are discerned, shown and channelled into the image. However, they are not evaluated, nor is any attempt made to present reality in an explicable format or pattern.

The curtain on “NOW AND THEN” is raised with the website for the project titled “Don’t Follow the Wind”. Initiated by artist group Chim↑Pom and with ten international artists in radioactively contaminated houses near the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the exhibition on the Tepco company site is not visible in any real sense. The contaminated site is out of bounds for the general public until such time as it is decontaminated. It is not known when and even whether this will ever be the case. Accordingly, the website is also “invisible”. A blank white screen with a soundtrack, but nothing to be seen.

Since 2000, | PRISKA PASQUER has shown many exhibitions featuring the leading names in Japanese photography – both in its own gallery rooms and in cooperation with institutions in Germany and abroad (e.g. FOAM in Amsterdam, Fondation Henri-Cartier-Bresson in Paris, FOMU in Antwerp and Hundertwasser Haus in Vienna).

| DE

„NOW AND THEN“ ist die zweite Ausstellung in den neuen Räumen von | PRISKA PASQUER. Sie widmet sich der japanischen Fotografie und Kunst.

Die Ausstellung vereint verschiedene Zeiten und Medien. Klassische Positionen der japanischen  Nachkriegsfotografie stehen neben den achtsam- konzentrierten Aufnahmen von Rinko Kawauchi, die knallbunte Pop-Ästhetik von Mika Ninagawa kollidiert mit der rauen Bildsprache der “Provoke”- Protagonisten Daido Moriyama und Yutaka Takanashi, aktuelle Malerei von Leiko Ikemura trifft auf eine digitale LED-Installation von Tatsuo Miyajima.

Auf inhaltlicher Ebene richtet „NOW AND THEN“ den Blick auf die japanische Gesellschaft. Vergangenheit, Gegenwart, Zukunft, Veränderungen und Bedrohungen, Möglichkeiten und Niederlagen werden aus unterschiedlichsten Perspektiven fokussiert. So verschieden die künstlerischen Positionen auch sind, eint sie doch ein spezifisch japanischer Umgang mit der Wirklichkeit: Die Künstler versuchen nicht, das Vorhandene, Vorgefundene in feste Kategorien zu fassen, sondern begegnen der Wirklichkeit mit einer großen Offenheit. Aus diesem Ansatz heraus entwickelt sich eine besondere Ästhetik. Es ist ein Spiel mit dem Sichtbaren und dem Unsichtbaren, das immer auf mehr verweist, als im Bild konkret sichtbar ist.

Dabei sprechen alle Künstler ganz konkrete Themen an. Immer geht es um die Brüche, Veränderungen und den Wandel. Diese werden wahrgenommen, gezeigt und ins Bild übertragen. Sie werden jedoch weder bewertet, noch wird versucht, die Wirklichkeit in ein erklärbares Format und Raster zu bringen.

Den Auftakt zu „NOW AND THEN“ macht die Website des Projekts „Don’t Follow the Wind”. Die von der Künstlergruppe Chim↑Pom initiierte und mit zehn internationalen Künstlern in radioaktiv verstrahlten Häusern in der Nähe des Atomkraftwerkes Fukushima realisierte Ausstellung auf dem Gelände der Firma Tepco ist faktisch nicht sichtbar. Das verstrahlte Gelände ist für die Öffentlichkeit gesperrt und wird erst nach seiner Dekontaminierung wieder betreten werden können. Es ist vollkommen ungewiss, wann und ob dies jemals der Fall sein wird. Entsprechend „unsichtbar“ ist auch die Website: Ein leerer weißer Screen, auf dem nur ein Sound-Track läuft, aber nichts zu sehen ist.

Seit dem Jahr 2000 hat | PRISKA PASQUER eine Vielzahl von Ausstellungen mit den bedeutendsten Vertretern der japanischen Fotografie gezeigt – sowohl in den eigenen Räumen als auch in Zusammenarbeit mit Institutionen im In- und
Ausland (z. B. FOAM, Amsterdam, Fondation Henri-Cartier-Bresson, Paris, FOMU, Antwerpen, Hundertwasser Haus, Wien).

YUTAKA TAKANASHI, Something Else

/in /by

SOMETHING ELSE
Yutaka Takanashi

September 8th – November 3rd, 2012

 

| DE
Galerie Priska Pasquer is pleased to present the second exhibition in Germany to be devoted exclusively to the works of Japanese photographer Yutaka Takanashi (born 1935).
 
One of the founders of the legendary “Provoke” group that revolutionised Japanese photography at the end of the 1960s, Takanashi’s influence can still be felt in Japan and in the West to this day.
 
Only recently, the works of Yutaka Takanashi were on display at the “Yutaka Takanashi” solo show at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. The Galerie Priska Pasquer exhibition features a selection of works from the Paris exhibition. Among the images on display are black-and-white photographs from the publication “Toshi-e” (Towards the City, 1974) and early colour photographs from the volume “Machi” (Town, 1977) in addition to works from the series “Shinjuku – Text of a City” from 1982-83.
 
The central theme of Yutaka Takanashi’s work is the restless shift in the Tokyo cityscape against the backdrop of the rapidly changing Japanese society.
In “Toshi-e”, Takanashi combines a multi-layered image of Tokyo and its inhabitants with glimpses of bleak, gloomy landscapes – generally denuded of 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” style, which is characterised in Japan as “are, bure, boke” (“grainy, blurred and out of focus”).
With this raw, fleeting and expressive imagery, Takanashi and the other members of the “Provoke” group – which included, among others, Daido Moriyama – finally broke with the aesthetic of “reporting” photography and, in turn, with the notion that photography is capable of creating an authentic image of reality. At the same time, Takanashi’s “Toshi-e” creates a gloomy future vision of an industrial nation whose environment appears increasingly hostile to life and in which human beings are ultimately foreign bodies.
 
Right after “Toshi-e”, Yutaka Takanashi changed his style of photography fundamentally. Instead of the moving 35mm camera, Takanashi switched to a large plate camera. In “Machi” (Town), Takanashi shows the vanishing pre-war Tokyo. In precise Cibachrome prints with warm colours, Takanashi describes the narrow suburban streets where old-fashioned wood and brick buildings are home to small shops and businesses.
The exhibition also shows works from the series “Shinjuku – Text of the City” (1982-83) – colour photographs of small bars and narrow streets in the Shinjuku district. In this series, the artist focuses his attention on the spatial elements of the establishments.
 
The change in photographic techniques is indicative of Takanashi’s rational use of the medium of photography. With his choice of camera, he fell in line with the changing realities in Japan’s capital. He used the 35mm camera in motion to record the constant flow of the city and, in the case of Toshi-e, he was a “hunter” seeking to capture his bleak vision of Japan in a series of photographs. The plate camera enabled him – in what he termed “scrap picker” mode – 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.
“I have taken many pictures of the changing city at different times. I changed cameras. I changed the distance from the object. I changed my walking speed when taking pictures. My aim is not to make a vast pyramid of masterpieces but rather to walk on the ground making anonymous pictures. I will keep on walking further and further along this infinite line.” (Yutaka Takanashi)
 
Brief biography
Born in in Shirogane-cho, Ushigome-ku (now Shinjuku, Tokyo) in 1935, studied photography at Nihon University. First photographs published in Sankei Camera. Provided darkroom assistance for Osamu Yagi. 1959-61: Studied at Kuawasa Design School.
Employed as a photographer at Nippon Design Center; received several awards for his advertising photography. Undertook non-commercial photographic projects at the same time. 1968: Founded Provoke magazine together with Takuma Nakahira, Takahiko Okada and Koji Taki. 1974: First publication Toshi-e (Towards the City), which is seen as a masterpiece of the Provoke era. Works in black-and-white and in colour, imbued with a fascination for people and urban space, are included in further photo books such as Machi, Tokyo-jin 1978-1983 and Miyako no Kao. 1980: Assistant Professor, 1982-2000 Full Professor at Tokyo Zokei University of Art and Design.
Received many awards, including the Japan Photo Critics Association Award as “Newcomer” in 1964, the Grand Prix Youth Biennale in Paris in 1967, the Award of the Year from the Photographic Society of Japan in 1984 and 1993, and the Domon Ken Award in 2012. Yutaka Takanashi lives and works in Tokyo.
The works of Yutaka Takanashi have been shown in a variety of individual and group exhibitions. These include “Fifteen Photographers Today”, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 1974; “New Photography from Japan”, Kunsthaus Graz, 1976; “Photokina ‘78”, Cologne 1978; “Tokyo, City Perspective”, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo 1990; “Japanese Culture: the Fifty Postwar Years”, Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo 1996; Retrospectives: “Yutaka Takanashi: Field Notes of Light”, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 2009; “Yutaka Takanashi, Photography 1965-74” Galerie Priska Pasquer, Cologne 2010; “Tokyo-e”, Le Bal, Paris, 2011; “Yutaka Takanashi”, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris 2012.
 
Selected publications
– Toshi-e (Towards the City). Tokyo 1974
– Machi (Town). Tokyo 1977
– Toshi wa Yume Mizu (City doesn’t dream). Tokyo 1979
– Tokyo-jin 1979-1983 (Tokyoites 1978 – 1983). Tokyo 1983
– Miyako no Kao: Visages of a Metropolis. Tokyo (1989)
– Menmoku Yakujo: Jombutsushashin kurunikuru (Chronicle of Portrait Works), 1964-1989. Tokyo 1990
– Jinzo (Human Images). Tokyo 1979
– Hatsukuni: Pre-Landscape. Tokyo 1993
– Chimeiron: Genius Loci. Tokyo 2000
– Nostalgia. Tokyo
– Kakoi-machi (Fencing City). Tokyo 2007
– Yutaka Takanashi. Field Notes of Light. Tokyo 2009
– Yutaka Takanashi, Toshi-e, Books on Books #6, New York 2010
– Yutaka Takanashi – Photography 1965-1974, Berlin 2010
– In’. Tokyo 2011
– Yutaka Takanashi, Paris 2012
| EN
Galerie Priska Pasquer is pleased to present the second exhibition in Germany to be devoted exclusively to the works of Japanese photographer Yutaka Takanashi (born 1935).
 
One of the founders of the legendary “Provoke” group that revolutionised Japanese photography at the end of the 1960s, Takanashi’s influence can still be felt in Japan and in the West to this day.
 
Only recently, the works of Yutaka Takanashi were on display at the “Yutaka Takanashi” solo show at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. The Galerie Priska Pasquer exhibition features a selection of works from the Paris exhibition. Among the images on display are black-and-white photographs from the publication “Toshi-e” (Towards the City, 1974) and early colour photographs from the volume “Machi” (Town, 1977) in addition to works from the series “Shinjuku – Text of a City” from 1982-83.
 
The central theme of Yutaka Takanashi’s work is the restless shift in the Tokyo cityscape against the backdrop of the rapidly changing Japanese society.
In “Toshi-e”, Takanashi combines a multi-layered image of Tokyo and its inhabitants with glimpses of bleak, gloomy landscapes – generally denuded of 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” style, which is characterised in Japan as “are, bure, boke” (“grainy, blurred and out of focus”).
With this raw, fleeting and expressive imagery, Takanashi and the other members of the “Provoke” group – which included, among others, Daido Moriyama – finally broke with the aesthetic of “reporting” photography and, in turn, with the notion that photography is capable of creating an authentic image of reality. At the same time, Takanashi’s “Toshi-e” creates a gloomy future vision of an industrial nation whose environment appears increasingly hostile to life and in which human beings are ultimately foreign bodies.
 
Right after “Toshi-e”, Yutaka Takanashi changed his style of photography fundamentally. Instead of the moving 35mm camera, Takanashi switched to a large plate camera. In “Machi” (Town), Takanashi shows the vanishing pre-war Tokyo. In precise Cibachrome prints with warm colours, Takanashi describes the narrow suburban streets where old-fashioned wood and brick buildings are home to small shops and businesses.
The exhibition also shows works from the series “Shinjuku – Text of the City” (1982-83) – colour photographs of small bars and narrow streets in the Shinjuku district. In this series, the artist focuses his attention on the spatial elements of the establishments.
 
The change in photographic techniques is indicative of Takanashi’s rational use of the medium of photography. With his choice of camera, he fell in line with the changing realities in Japan’s capital. He used the 35mm camera in motion to record the constant flow of the city and, in the case of Toshi-e, he was a “hunter” seeking to capture his bleak vision of Japan in a series of photographs. The plate camera enabled him – in what he termed “scrap picker” mode – 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.
“I have taken many pictures of the changing city at different times. I changed cameras. I changed the distance from the object. I changed my walking speed when taking pictures. My aim is not to make a vast pyramid of masterpieces but rather to walk on the ground making anonymous pictures. I will keep on walking further and further along this infinite line.” (Yutaka Takanashi)
 
Brief biography
Born in in Shirogane-cho, Ushigome-ku (now Shinjuku, Tokyo) in 1935, studied photography at Nihon University. First photographs published in Sankei Camera. Provided darkroom assistance for Osamu Yagi. 1959-61: Studied at Kuawasa Design School.
Employed as a photographer at Nippon Design Center; received several awards for his advertising photography. Undertook non-commercial photographic projects at the same time. 1968: Founded Provoke magazine together with Takuma Nakahira, Takahiko Okada and Koji Taki. 1974: First publication Toshi-e (Towards the City), which is seen as a masterpiece of the Provoke era. Works in black-and-white and in colour, imbued with a fascination for people and urban space, are included in further photo books such as Machi, Tokyo-jin 1978-1983 and Miyako no Kao. 1980: Assistant Professor, 1982-2000 Full Professor at Tokyo Zokei University of Art and Design.
Received many awards, including the Japan Photo Critics Association Award as “Newcomer” in 1964, the Grand Prix Youth Biennale in Paris in 1967, the Award of the Year from the Photographic Society of Japan in 1984 and 1993, and the Domon Ken Award in 2012. Yutaka Takanashi lives and works in Tokyo.
The works of Yutaka Takanashi have been shown in a variety of individual and group exhibitions. These include “Fifteen Photographers Today”, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 1974; “New Photography from Japan”, Kunsthaus Graz, 1976; “Photokina ‘78”, Cologne 1978; “Tokyo, City Perspective”, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo 1990; “Japanese Culture: the Fifty Postwar Years”, Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo 1996; Retrospectives: “Yutaka Takanashi: Field Notes of Light”, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 2009; “Yutaka Takanashi, Photography 1965-74” Galerie Priska Pasquer, Cologne 2010; “Tokyo-e”, Le Bal, Paris, 2011; “Yutaka Takanashi”, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris 2012.
 
Selected publications
– Toshi-e (Towards the City). Tokyo 1974
– Machi (Town). Tokyo 1977
– Toshi wa Yume Mizu (City doesn’t dream). Tokyo 1979
– Tokyo-jin 1979-1983 (Tokyoites 1978 – 1983). Tokyo 1983
– Miyako no Kao: Visages of a Metropolis. Tokyo (1989)
– Menmoku Yakujo: Jombutsushashin kurunikuru (Chronicle of Portrait Works), 1964-1989. Tokyo 1990
– Jinzo (Human Images). Tokyo 1979
– Hatsukuni: Pre-Landscape. Tokyo 1993
– Chimeiron: Genius Loci. Tokyo 2000
– Nostalgia. Tokyo
– Kakoi-machi (Fencing City). Tokyo 2007
– Yutaka Takanashi. Field Notes of Light. Tokyo 2009
– Yutaka Takanashi, Toshi-e, Books on Books #6, New York 2010
– Yutaka Takanashi – Photography 1965-1974, Berlin 2010
– In’. Tokyo 2011
– Yutaka Takanashi, Paris 2012

YUTAKA TAKANASHI at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

/in /by

YUTAKA TAKANASHI

FONDATION HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, PARIS

May 10th – July 29th, 2012

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| DE

“For me, my concern was to give meaning.”

From May 10th to July 29th, Fondation HCB will be showing the emblematic series of Yutaka Takanashi, one of the great master of Japanese photography.
Yutaka Takanashi has always photographed the city – close up, far away, even very far away, from a moving car – sometimes on the lookout for an image charged with poetry, sometimes ‘picking up’ a scrap of reality. As he has often repeated, these two approaches confront one another in his work: poetry/realism, mirror/window, visible/invisible. The important thing for him is to make his way over the terrain, to ‘walk on the ground’ in order to make ‘anonymous pictures’.
Takanashi was a founding member of the well-known collective Provoke in 1968 – the group briefly published the photography magazine of the same name – but he did not yield to the somewhat romantic indulgence of the offbeat blurry image. The provocative aspect of this short-lived phenomenon hid a profound reaction to the photography establishment. In this sense, Provoke was in tune with the protest movements which inflamed the world in the late 1960s.
Toshi-e (Towards the city), his first major book in black and white, marked the end of Provoke, but also the photographer’s distanced stance, for he managed to assert his own style by not giving in to the siren songs of the moment, but rather, absorbing them. His two-level approach to the city, from a distance in the beginning, and then very close up, with human figures, was extremely original: at the time, Tokyo was in the throes of an industrial transformation which changed frame of reference and undermined certainties. Takanashi set out in search of the invisible, a different poetics in unlikely urban spaces. He rejected narrative, revolted against the tautological aspect of photography, which he found boring, but when he grew tired of this ‘hunt’ for the invisible, ultimately decided to abandon his Leica for a large-format camera and colour negatives.
Machi (Town), his second major book, is the very opposite of Toshi-e. ‘With Machi, I tried to get rid of being poetic’, explains the photographer, who was able to find a form of modernity in this calm, well-thought-out approach to the city from within (closer to the images of an Atget, for example) in the mid-1970s. The sense of detail, of life momentarily brought to a standstill, is also quite present in the series of Shinjuku bars at closing time. Time is now suspended, unlike the ‘moving’ roadside images from the 1960s.
This group of pictures offers a different vision, a new photographic vocabulary proper to Takanashi, who readily speaks of the text of the images, of the connections between them. He has always taken great care with the making of his books, which remain the expression of a unique, singular voice committed to giving meaning.
We are very proud to have been given the privilege of exhibiting this set of works for the first time in Paris. Such an undertaking would have been impossible without the determined efforts of the Galerie Priska Pasquer, which has promoted Japanese photography, and especially the work of Takanashi, for many years. We are also extremely grateful to Éditions Toluca for its participation in this project through the production of part of the exhibition and the publication of the catalogue. And our warm thanks go to Yutaka Takanashi for honouring us with the confidence which was essential for the realisation of this project.

| EN

“For me, my concern was to give meaning.”

From May 10th to July 29th, Fondation HCB will be showing the emblematic series of Yutaka Takanashi, one of the great master of Japanese photography.
Yutaka Takanashi has always photographed the city – close up, far away, even very far away, from a moving car – sometimes on the lookout for an image charged with poetry, sometimes ‘picking up’ a scrap of reality. As he has often repeated, these two approaches confront one another in his work: poetry/realism, mirror/window, visible/invisible. The important thing for him is to make his way over the terrain, to ‘walk on the ground’ in order to make ‘anonymous pictures’.
Takanashi was a founding member of the well-known collective Provoke in 1968 – the group briefly published the photography magazine of the same name – but he did not yield to the somewhat romantic indulgence of the offbeat blurry image. The provocative aspect of this short-lived phenomenon hid a profound reaction to the photography establishment. In this sense, Provoke was in tune with the protest movements which inflamed the world in the late 1960s.
Toshi-e (Towards the city), his first major book in black and white, marked the end of Provoke, but also the photographer’s distanced stance, for he managed to assert his own style by not giving in to the siren songs of the moment, but rather, absorbing them. His two-level approach to the city, from a distance in the beginning, and then very close up, with human figures, was extremely original: at the time, Tokyo was in the throes of an industrial transformation which changed frame of reference and undermined certainties. Takanashi set out in search of the invisible, a different poetics in unlikely urban spaces. He rejected narrative, revolted against the tautological aspect of photography, which he found boring, but when he grew tired of this ‘hunt’ for the invisible, ultimately decided to abandon his Leica for a large-format camera and colour negatives.
Machi (Town), his second major book, is the very opposite of Toshi-e. ‘With Machi, I tried to get rid of being poetic’, explains the photographer, who was able to find a form of modernity in this calm, well-thought-out approach to the city from within (closer to the images of an Atget, for example) in the mid-1970s. The sense of detail, of life momentarily brought to a standstill, is also quite present in the series of Shinjuku bars at closing time. Time is now suspended, unlike the ‘moving’ roadside images from the 1960s.
This group of pictures offers a different vision, a new photographic vocabulary proper to Takanashi, who readily speaks of the text of the images, of the connections between them. He has always taken great care with the making of his books, which remain the expression of a unique, singular voice committed to giving meaning.
We are very proud to have been given the privilege of exhibiting this set of works for the first time in Paris. Such an undertaking would have been impossible without the determined efforts of the Galerie Priska Pasquer, which has promoted Japanese photography, and especially the work of Takanashi, for many years. We are also extremely grateful to Éditions Toluca for its participation in this project through the production of part of the exhibition and the publication of the catalogue. And our warm thanks go to Yutaka Takanashi for honouring us with the confidence which was essential for the realisation of this project.

Araki, Moriyama, Takanashi, Tomatsu, JAPAN 4

/in /by

JAPAN 4
Araki, Moriyama, Takanashi, Tomatsu

Jablonka Pasquer Projects

September 10th – November 11th, 2011

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| DE

Galerie Priska Pasquer and Jablonka Galerie are delighted to be embarking on a new partnership for the 2011 autumn season. At Lindenstr. 19, Jablonka Pasquer Projects is presenting the exhibition:
Japan 4
Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Yutaka Takanashi, Shomei Tomatsu
The exhibition centrally features four Japanese photographers whose work has significantly influenced the medium both within Japan and internationally.
Shomei Tomatsu (*1930) is the most important Japanese photographer of the latter half of the twentieth century. His photography series on the deep-reaching changes that have taken hold in Japanese society since the 1950s and his brilliant and powerful imagery make him the pre-eminent figure in Japanese art. The exhibition features a selection of the artist’s work from his central series, including ‘Bottle Melted and Deformed by Atomic Bomb Heat, Radiation and Fire, Nagasaki’ from the ‘Nagasaki 11:02’ series, as well as his ‘Eros’ work from the ‘OO! Shinjuku’ cover photography on the 1968 generation in Tokyo.
Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama and Yutaka Takanashi are representatives of the ‘Provoke’ generation of artists that forged new frontiers and decisively broadened the scope of photography as a medium.
Yutaka Takanashi (*1935) and Daido Moriyama (*1938), co-founder and member of the ‘Provoke’ group (1968) respectively, radically broke from conventions in photography with their raw expressive style of ‘are, bore, boke’ (rough, blurred and out of focus). Like Shomei Tomatsu, they are driven by the search for identity in contemporary society, a society caught on the cusp between centuries-old traditions and modernity.
The search for the elemental in society and in individual existence leads Daido Moriyama to the grey fringes of Japanese life – to strip clubs, to the back rooms of cheap kabuki theatres and to bars catering to American soldiers, but first and foremost to the street and throughout rural Japan.
Yutaka Takanashi’s central theme is also change in Japan. In dark images, he describes a country that in vast areas has become a no man’s land between city and country devoid of any place for human beings except as consumers under the sway of American popular culture.
The revolutionary imagery of the ‘Provoke’ group continues to influence street photography in Japan and in the West to this day.
Nobuyoshi Araki (*1940), a contemporary of Takanashi and Moriyama, took a different path in both subject matter and imagery, one founded on an examination of Eros and Thanatos, the taboo depiction of sexuality in the mirror of ephemerality and death. His art flouts both societal and aesthetic rules, showing human sexuality unfiltered. Araki’s pictures range from subtle erotic studies to seemingly pornographic works while renouncing customary evaluations of of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ pictures.
In his work, he also unites two separate areas, such as personal and commission work, studio shots and street photography, private pictures and public. Nobuyoshi Araki’s work is in many respects marked by a radical transcendence of borders and unbridled excessiveness.

| EN

Galerie Priska Pasquer and Jablonka Galerie are delighted to be embarking on a new partnership for the 2011 autumn season. At Lindenstr. 19, Jablonka Pasquer Projects is presenting the exhibition:
Japan 4
Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Yutaka Takanashi, Shomei Tomatsu
The exhibition centrally features four Japanese photographers whose work has significantly influenced the medium both within Japan and internationally.
Shomei Tomatsu (*1930) is the most important Japanese photographer of the latter half of the twentieth century. His photography series on the deep-reaching changes that have taken hold in Japanese society since the 1950s and his brilliant and powerful imagery make him the pre-eminent figure in Japanese art. The exhibition features a selection of the artist’s work from his central series, including ‘Bottle Melted and Deformed by Atomic Bomb Heat, Radiation and Fire, Nagasaki’ from the ‘Nagasaki 11:02’ series, as well as his ‘Eros’ work from the ‘OO! Shinjuku’ cover photography on the 1968 generation in Tokyo.
Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama and Yutaka Takanashi are representatives of the ‘Provoke’ generation of artists that forged new frontiers and decisively broadened the scope of photography as a medium.
Yutaka Takanashi (*1935) and Daido Moriyama (*1938), co-founder and member of the ‘Provoke’ group (1968) respectively, radically broke from conventions in photography with their raw expressive style of ‘are, bore, boke’ (rough, blurred and out of focus). Like Shomei Tomatsu, they are driven by the search for identity in contemporary society, a society caught on the cusp between centuries-old traditions and modernity.
The search for the elemental in society and in individual existence leads Daido Moriyama to the grey fringes of Japanese life – to strip clubs, to the back rooms of cheap kabuki theatres and to bars catering to American soldiers, but first and foremost to the street and throughout rural Japan.
Yutaka Takanashi’s central theme is also change in Japan. In dark images, he describes a country that in vast areas has become a no man’s land between city and country devoid of any place for human beings except as consumers under the sway of American popular culture.
The revolutionary imagery of the ‘Provoke’ group continues to influence street photography in Japan and in the West to this day.
Nobuyoshi Araki (*1940), a contemporary of Takanashi and Moriyama, took a different path in both subject matter and imagery, one founded on an examination of Eros and Thanatos, the taboo depiction of sexuality in the mirror of ephemerality and death. His art flouts both societal and aesthetic rules, showing human sexuality unfiltered. Araki’s pictures range from subtle erotic studies to seemingly pornographic works while renouncing customary evaluations of of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ pictures.
In his work, he also unites two separate areas, such as personal and commission work, studio shots and street photography, private pictures and public. Nobuyoshi Araki’s work is in many respects marked by a radical transcendence of borders and unbridled excessiveness.

YUTAKA TAKANASHI, TOKYO-E at Le Bal, Paris

/in /by

TOKYO-E
Yutaka Takanashi
Le Bal, Paris

May 20th – April 21st, 2011

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Tokyo-e
Keizo Kitajima / 1975-1990
YUTAKA TAKANASHI / Machi (1975)
Yukichi Watabe / A Criminal Investigation (1958)

In Japanese, Tokyo-e has got both meanings at the same time: «towards Tokyo» and «images of Tokyo.» This coexistence of two conflicting forces, one that strains towards some elusive reality and, one that simultaneously solidifies appearances, poses in an acute and singular way a paradox of Japanese photography.

How can you represent a territory that is intrinsically perceived as flowing? How can you photograph cities, bodies and objects which are, by nature, shifting, fleeting and forever changing?

These three photographers are looking for the uncertain formula of a culturally mixed Japanese identity, under American influence, and drastically altered by modernity’s new forms. In three distinct ways, their photography challenges a Japan that can’t avoid being thrust into the world’s disorder.

YUTAKA TAKANASHI / Machi (1975)

Co-founder, in 1968, of the legendary Provoke magazine, Yutaka Takanashi is a major character in the history of Japanese photography. In his 1974 book Toshi-e (Towards the City), he caught, in quivering flight, a fast-changing Japanese society, marked by the emergence of political and artistic avant-gardes.

Started a year after the publication of Toshi-e, the Machi series radically broke up with the blurred, overexposed, expressionist, black and white style of the Provoke years. Takanashi then focused on one of the most ancient districts of Tokyo, Shitamachi, where little by little the traditional world was being invaded by signs of modernity. His interior and exterior Portraits bear witness to this planned disappearance, in the intense yet faded colours of still lifes.

These Portraits are devoid of any human presence. Sometimes, rarely, there remain traces of life: some garment, a rusty bicycle. A city (Machi), yes, but gutted by who knows what catastrophe. The compositions are extremely rich, frames within the frame, a profusion of details and plays of colours, contradicting this feeling of immobility and silence by confronting it with countless lines of force. Their confrontation yields a strange disquiet: haunted photographs, haunted maybe by the last breath of everlasting Japan. Takanashi returns to Shitamachi in the same way as you pay a visit to your dead.

The series, partly published in Asahi Camera magazine, starting in 1975, became the subject of Machi, a book published in 1977 by The Asahi Shinbun.

| EN

Tokyo-e
Keizo Kitajima / 1975-1990
YUTAKA TAKANASHI / Machi (1975)
Yukichi Watabe / A Criminal Investigation (1958)

In Japanese, Tokyo-e has got both meanings at the same time: «towards Tokyo» and «images of Tokyo.» This coexistence of two conflicting forces, one that strains towards some elusive reality and, one that simultaneously solidifies appearances, poses in an acute and singular way a paradox of Japanese photography.

How can you represent a territory that is intrinsically perceived as flowing? How can you photograph cities, bodies and objects which are, by nature, shifting, fleeting and forever changing?

These three photographers are looking for the uncertain formula of a culturally mixed Japanese identity, under American influence, and drastically altered by modernity’s new forms. In three distinct ways, their photography challenges a Japan that can’t avoid being thrust into the world’s disorder.

YUTAKA TAKANASHI / Machi (1975)

Co-founder, in 1968, of the legendary Provoke magazine, Yutaka Takanashi is a major character in the history of Japanese photography. In his 1974 book Toshi-e (Towards the City), he caught, in quivering flight, a fast-changing Japanese society, marked by the emergence of political and artistic avant-gardes.

Started a year after the publication of Toshi-e, the Machi series radically broke up with the blurred, overexposed, expressionist, black and white style of the Provoke years. Takanashi then focused on one of the most ancient districts of Tokyo, Shitamachi, where little by little the traditional world was being invaded by signs of modernity. His interior and exterior Portraits bear witness to this planned disappearance, in the intense yet faded colours of still lifes.

These Portraits are devoid of any human presence. Sometimes, rarely, there remain traces of life: some garment, a rusty bicycle. A city (Machi), yes, but gutted by who knows what catastrophe. The compositions are extremely rich, frames within the frame, a profusion of details and plays of colours, contradicting this feeling of immobility and silence by confronting it with countless lines of force. Their confrontation yields a strange disquiet: haunted photographs, haunted maybe by the last breath of everlasting Japan. Takanashi returns to Shitamachi in the same way as you pay a visit to your dead.

The series, partly published in Asahi Camera magazine, starting in 1975, became the subject of Machi, a book published in 1977 by The Asahi Shinbun.

YUTAKA TAKANASHI, Towards the City

/in /by

TOWARDS THE CITY
Yutaka Takanashi

April 22nd – June 8th, 2010

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| DE

Galerie Priska Pasquer is pleased to present an exhibition of the works of Japanese photographer Yutaka Takanashi, whom the gallery represents exclusively since the beginning of 2010.
In the first overseas solo exhibition to be devoted to his works since the mid-1980s, a selection of Takanashi’s works from the period 1963 – 1974 will be featured.

Yutaka Takanashi was one of the co-founders of the legendary ‘Provoke’ group which revolutionised Japanese photography at the end of the 1960s. Other members of this group included Daido Moriyamya – the subject of two past exhibitions by Galerie Priska Pasquer – and Takuma Nakahira.
The works in this exhibition were published by Yutaka Takanashi in 1974 in the two-part volume ‘Toshi-e’ (Towards the City). This elaborate publication marked both the high-water mark and the end of the ‘Provoke’ era.

While the urban images of the city of Tokyo still bear the hallmarks of subjective documentary photography, the landscape shots are wholly in the radical ‘Provoke’ style, characterised in Japan as ‘are, bure, boke’ – rough, blurred and out of focus.

With this rough, fleeting and highly expressive imagery, Takanashi and the other members of the ‘Provoke’ group finally broke with the aesthetic of ‘photography as reportage’ and its underlying notion that photography is capable of creating an authentic image of reality.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Born 1935 in Shirogane-cho, Ushigome-ku (today Shinjuku, Tokyo). Study of photography at Nihon University. First works published in Sankei Camera. Darkroom assistant of the photographer Osamu Yagi. 1959-61 Kuwasa Design School. Professional photographer at Nippon Design Center, various awards for his advertising work. Meanwhile personal, non-commercial projects.
1968 founding of the photo magazine Provoke along with Takuma Nakahira, Takahiko Okada, Koji Taki. 1974 first book Toshi-e (Towards the City) which is regarded as a masterpiece of the Provoke era. Working both in black and white and color, his fascination with the spaces and people in urban environments continues in later books like Machi, Tokyo-jin 1978-1983 or Miyako no Kao. 1980 assistant professor, 1982-2000 professor at Tokyo Zokei University of Art and Design. Recipient of many awards including the Japan Photo Critics Association Award for ‘New Comer’ in 1964, the Grand Prix Youth Biennale in Paris 1967, 1984 and 1993 ‘Award of the Year’ of the Photographic Society of Japan. He lives and works in Tokyo.

His work has been widely exhibited, amongst others in ‘Fifteen Photographers Today’, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 1971; ‘Neue Fotografie aus Japan’, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria1976; ‘Photokina `78’, Cologne 1978; ‘Tokyo, City Perspective’, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo 1990; ‘Japanese Culture: the Fifty Postwar Years’, Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo 1996; Retrospective: ‘Yutaka Takanashi: Field Notes of Light’, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 2009

PUBLICATIONS (SELECTION)
– Toshi-e (Towards the City). Tokyo 1974
– Machi (Town). Tokyo 1977
– Toshi wa Yume Mizu (City doesn’t Dream). Tokyo 1979
– Tokyo-jin 1979-1983 (Tokyoites 1978 – 1983). Tokyo 1983
– Miyako no Kao: Visages of a Metropolis. Tokyo (1989)
– Menmoku Yakujo: Jombutsushashin kurunikuru (Chronicle of Portrait Works), 1964-1989. Tokyo 1990
– Jinzo (Human Images). Tokyo 1979
– Hatsukuni: Pre-Landscape. Tokyo 1993
– Chimeiron: Genius Loci. Tokyo 2000
– Nostalghia. Tokyo 2004
– Kakoi-machi (Fencing City). Tokyo 2007
– Yutaka Takanashi. Field Notes of Light. Tokyo 2009

NEW PUBLICATION

‘Yutaka Takanashi – Photography 1965-1974’
editors.: Roland Angst, Ferdinand Brüggemann, Priska Pasquer
Hardcover, 116 pages, 41 images, Triplex, Ed. 500
text german/english/japanese

Special Edition
with a silver gelatine print from ‘Toshi-e’ (Towards the City, 1974), in slipcase,
ed. 30

| EN

Galerie Priska Pasquer is pleased to present an exhibition of the works of Japanese photographer Yutaka Takanashi, whom the gallery represents exclusively since the beginning of 2010.
In the first overseas solo exhibition to be devoted to his works since the mid-1980s, a selection of Takanashi’s works from the period 1963 – 1974 will be featured.

Yutaka Takanashi was one of the co-founders of the legendary ‘Provoke’ group which revolutionised Japanese photography at the end of the 1960s. Other members of this group included Daido Moriyamya – the subject of two past exhibitions by Galerie Priska Pasquer – and Takuma Nakahira.
The works in this exhibition were published by Yutaka Takanashi in 1974 in the two-part volume ‘Toshi-e’ (Towards the City). This elaborate publication marked both the high-water mark and the end of the ‘Provoke’ era.

While the urban images of the city of Tokyo still bear the hallmarks of subjective documentary photography, the landscape shots are wholly in the radical ‘Provoke’ style, characterised in Japan as ‘are, bure, boke’ – rough, blurred and out of focus.

With this rough, fleeting and highly expressive imagery, Takanashi and the other members of the ‘Provoke’ group finally broke with the aesthetic of ‘photography as reportage’ and its underlying notion that photography is capable of creating an authentic image of reality.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Born 1935 in Shirogane-cho, Ushigome-ku (today Shinjuku, Tokyo). Study of photography at Nihon University. First works published in Sankei Camera. Darkroom assistant of the photographer Osamu Yagi. 1959-61 Kuwasa Design School. Professional photographer at Nippon Design Center, various awards for his advertising work. Meanwhile personal, non-commercial projects.
1968 founding of the photo magazine Provoke along with Takuma Nakahira, Takahiko Okada, Koji Taki. 1974 first book Toshi-e (Towards the City) which is regarded as a masterpiece of the Provoke era. Working both in black and white and color, his fascination with the spaces and people in urban environments continues in later books like Machi, Tokyo-jin 1978-1983 or Miyako no Kao. 1980 assistant professor, 1982-2000 professor at Tokyo Zokei University of Art and Design. Recipient of many awards including the Japan Photo Critics Association Award for ‘New Comer’ in 1964, the Grand Prix Youth Biennale in Paris 1967, 1984 and 1993 ‘Award of the Year’ of the Photographic Society of Japan. He lives and works in Tokyo.

His work has been widely exhibited, amongst others in ‘Fifteen Photographers Today’, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 1971; ‘Neue Fotografie aus Japan’, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria1976; ‘Photokina `78’, Cologne 1978; ‘Tokyo, City Perspective’, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo 1990; ‘Japanese Culture: the Fifty Postwar Years’, Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo 1996; Retrospective: ‘Yutaka Takanashi: Field Notes of Light’, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 2009

PUBLICATIONS (SELECTION)
– Toshi-e (Towards the City). Tokyo 1974
– Machi (Town). Tokyo 1977
– Toshi wa Yume Mizu (City doesn’t Dream). Tokyo 1979
– Tokyo-jin 1979-1983 (Tokyoites 1978 – 1983). Tokyo 1983
– Miyako no Kao: Visages of a Metropolis. Tokyo (1989)
– Menmoku Yakujo: Jombutsushashin kurunikuru (Chronicle of Portrait Works), 1964-1989. Tokyo 1990
– Jinzo (Human Images). Tokyo 1979
– Hatsukuni: Pre-Landscape. Tokyo 1993
– Chimeiron: Genius Loci. Tokyo 2000
– Nostalghia. Tokyo 2004
– Kakoi-machi (Fencing City). Tokyo 2007
– Yutaka Takanashi. Field Notes of Light. Tokyo 2009

NEW PUBLICATION

‘Yutaka Takanashi – Photography 1965-1974’
editors.: Roland Angst, Ferdinand Brüggemann, Priska Pasquer
Hardcover, 116 pages, 41 images, Triplex, Ed. 500
text german/english/japanese

Special Edition
with a silver gelatine print from ‘Toshi-e’ (Towards the City, 1974), in slipcase,
ed. 30