[Fall 2026]
At the Limits of the Gaze:
Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira
New York, Aperture, 2025, 164 pages
Nakahira Takuma: Burn-Overflow
Tokyo, The National Museum of Modern Art, LIVE Art Books, 2024, 500 pages
By Alexis Desgagnés
[EXCERPT]
A towering figure in Japanese photographic culture starting in the second half of the 1960s, Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015) produced a highly significant body of work. Although he was known mainly for his contribution to the legendary magazine Provoke (1968–69), his work seems to have been quite eclipsed by that of his contemporary, Daido Moriyama (1938–). Both Moriyama’s and Nakahira’s images often evince the are-bure-boke (grainy, blurry, out of focus) photographic aesthetic. His work stands out, however, because for more than a decade he embraced theory and practice simultaneously. It is precisely this singularity that the two posthumous publications I write about here bring to light.
At the Limits of the Gaze, published by Aperture, is an English-language anthology of eleven of Nakahira’s theoretical essays, written in Japanese and published between 1970 and 1976 in various books and magazines. These writings bring out his ambivalent relationship with photography – a relationship heavily coloured by his political thought. As the anthology’s editors underscore in their preface, he saw photography not simply as a means of artistic expression but also as an area of knowledge that enabled him to probe the alienating nature of images and their role in the consolidation of capitalist power.
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 133 – INTIMACIES ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here : Takuma Nakahira ]
Artist, author, and teacher Alexis Desgagnés lives in Montreal. Éditions du Renard has published his artist’s books Banqueroute (2016) and Ammoniaque (2021). With Serge Clément, he is the co-author of Métamorphose (2025), co-published by VU and Les éditions Loco.