With its rich visual history, highly evolved media, and nuanced approach to taboos, Japan has long nurtured outstanding photographic innovation. Increasing attention is now being given to a number of Japanese photographers past and present whose work shows how provocative photographic languages and methods can be.

Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015) cofounded the short-lived but groundbreaking photography collective and magazine ‘Provoke’ in 1968. Provoke published three now-legendary issues that featured blurry, dark, and out of focus images (the are-bure-boke style) that were hard-hitting social criticism, amplified by confrontational layout and presentation. Nakahira ultimately rejected this approach, however, in favor of socially engaged conceptual applications of the photographic process.

Take ‘Circulation: Date, Place, Events’, a project presented at the 1971 Biennale de Paris: Shooting incessantly as he wandered through Paris during the course of the event, Nakahira pinned new photos to the wall each day as an interactive diary, the images ultimately overflowing onto the floor. Even more radical was ‘Décalage’ (‘Offset’), created at Galerie ADDA in Marseille in 1976: After shooting 18 photos of a corner of the gallery from floor to ceiling, he pinned the actual-sized prints to the wall alongside it, slightly offset.

These works rejected the fixed, framed, wall-mounted photo-object in favor of situational encounters that held meaning only within the environments for which they were created. Despite illness and loss of memory, Nakahira continued to publish in magazines until shortly before his death. His periodic reevaluation and rejection of his own work led him to destroy most of his own early negatives, however, and not many vintage prints survive. A major solo retrospective: ‘Burn–Overflow’, was held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 2024.

In his brief 12-year career, Osaka-born Nobuo Yamanaka (1948–1982) developed a conceptual art practice that centered on pinhole camera images. Approximately 600 of Yamanaka’s hand-printed color and black-and-white images survive, each unique. A notable three-part series from 1980–81 was named for the locations in which each part was produced: ‘Machu Picchu in Pinhole’, ‘Manhattan in Pinhole’, and ‘Tokyo in Pinhole’. These engrossing and puzzling images of parks, alleyways, streetscapes, and natural scenery have a welcoming intimacy, as if we have been invited to peep into the world. The Tokyo scenes seem like everyday views as seen by a local resident. In the Manhattan views, it is the gaze of a tourist. Yamanaka’s photos have a timeless aura and rarely contain people. Prominent spectral halation caused by the sun’s rays has led to their characterization as ‘sun paintings.’

On several occasions, such as at Galerie Liliane et Michel Durand-Dessert in Paris in 1977, Yamanaka turned an entire space into a pinhole camera, covering the far wall with photosensitive paper which over the course of several hours captured an inverted image of the scenery outside. The images were then contact-printed at full scale and reinstalled in the same location. This work is very much about waiting and observing as the world moves outside us. For Yamanaka himself, it all stems from his own ‘thinking about time within the world.’ 

New York-based photographic artist Kunié Sugiura (b. 1942) left Japan at the age of 20 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, moving to New York the day after graduating in 1967. Drawn to photography’s potential as a medium for drawing with light, she created experimental images during her student period that used distortion, montage, multiple images, and manipulated color, culminating in the striking nudes and landscapes of her ‘Cko’ series.

She began printing her photos on canvas shortly after, and produced an extensive series called ‘Photocanvas’ between 1968 and 1971. Most involve individual subjects, including nudes, flowers, tree bark, and beach sand, printed on photo emulsion-coated canvases up to 2 meters wide, the underlying raw canvas lending the images a delicate sepia tint. Details and outlines were often enhanced with acrylic paint or graphite. Sugiura then distanced herself from photography for several years to concentrate on painting. But in 1976, by her own recounting, after placing a painting and a photo work side by side, she felt a ‘new tension and freshness’ arise from the comparison. Since then, Sugiura has become noted for her multi-panel ‘photo-painting’ works which combine photographic and painted images.

One intriguing series from the late 1970s employs enigmatic images of architecture and streetscapes opposite monochrome abstract paintings. Since 2009, she has embraced digital techniques in her ‘DG Photocanvas’ series, with images of geological strata and rocky walls transferred to canvas by inkjet. Among Sugiura’s most intriguing works are the series of photograms she began in 1981 and continues to this day. With living subjects including animals like frogs, kittens, and eels, whose movement generates abstract light compositions, these darkroom-based images embrace unpredictability and defy choice.

The probing, sexually charged photographs of Momo Okabe (b. 1981) cross many lines. Her singular vision and technique pay little heed to the rights and wrongs of contemporary photography, in both subject matter and the unique color characteristics of her self-printed 8 x 10-inch images. She considers her figurative work to be ‘family portraits’ of the people around her, whom she depicts at their most vulnerable, nude or semi-nude, often revisiting the same individuals repeatedly.

One notable series depicts a lover as they go through the process of gender reassignment surgery. A moving series of self-portraits documents her own IVF pregnancy and childbirth. Her tender photos of lovers dwell less on the struggle to live with physical integrity than on togetherness as healing.

Landscapes, mannequins, and plants, as well as the chaotic aftermath of the 2011 tsunami and earthquake in Tohoku, all fall under Okabe’s gaze, hand-printed with a skewed color balance that tinges the images orange, green, yellow, pink, or mauve. Scenes of foggy mountains, sometimes concealed, sometimes revealed, point back to her human subjects, causing us to consider how our bodies, like the world around us, often conceal as much of our inner nature as they uncover.