Museo Carmen Thyssen

Featuring an extensive selection of photographs from the José Luis Soler Vila Collection, which are displayed in the Sala Noble and Espacio ArteSonado, this exhibition brings together and summarises the main contributions made by photographers active in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s to the photography revolution in post-World War II Japan.

Grouped together as part of the Vivo cooperative (1959–61) – meaning ‘life’ in Esperanto and inspired by the European agency Magnum – and the magazine Provoke (which only brought out three issues between 1968 and 1970), the fifteen photographers selected gave shape to an avant-garde, experimental and uninhibited visual and thematic universe with a marked personality.

In a country in the midst of deep social change and a growing and unstoppable economic take-off, these nonconformist and radical photographers rejected direct, documentary and objective photography as a suitable language for capturing Japan's new reality. Instead, their images emerged as a subjective expression of the photographer's contemporary experience and a new and different language for creating ‘provocative materials for thought’, as the subtitle of the Provoke magazine stated. This invitation to reflect on identity, tradition, urban life, anti-American protests, the body and sex was conveyed through contrasting, out-of-focus or blurred photographs with unusual angles of view and textural effects in an aesthetic that enjoyed longstanding importance in Japan and earned major international recognition.

Selected from these photographers’ most important series and arranged according to conceptual and iconographic affinities, the photographs on display here are designed to reveal a fundamental creative period in contemporary Japanese art that will surprise and fascinate Western viewers in equal measure.

Takuma Nakahira
Circulation: Date, Place, Events series, 1971

The more than ninety photographs from this series covering the walls of the Espacio ArteSonado were part of an experimental live art project combining photography, installation and performance that was carried out by Takuma Nakahira during the 7th Paris Biennial in 1971. As if keeping a sort of diary of his wanderings through the streets, a real-time chronicle of Paris and of himself, he photographed, developed and exhibited (still wet, fresh out of the darkroom) each day’s pictures. As the photographer circulated around the city, his photos went from negative to print, from darkroom to display, from his gaze to that of the spectators who walked past the installation, which changed every day. These snapshots, conceived as a live work of art, also ended up being ephemeral, as Nakahira destroyed all his negatives in 1973. Their recent recovery has made it possible to re-create his unique photographic experience in the display in our exhibition gallery, once again encouraging the circulation of photographs and visitors.

Photo:

Shomei Tomatsu. Prostitute, Nagoya, 1958. Gelatin Silver Print. José Luis Soler Vila Collection, Valencia
© Shomei Tomatsu – INTERFACE / Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film

Daido Moriyama. Eros, “Provoke” magazine no 2, 1969. Gelatin Silver Print. José Luis Soler Vila Collection, Valencia
© Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation / Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery

Akira Sato. Untitled. “Cyclopean Eye” Series, c. 1960. Gelatin Silver Print. José Luis Soler Vila Collection, Valencia
© Akira Sato / Courtesy of Fujiko Sato

Takuma Nakahira. Untitled. “Circulation: Date, Place, Events”, 1971. Gelatin Silver Print. José Luis Soler Vila Collection, Valencia
© Gen Nakahira / Courtesy of Osiris and Taka Ishii Gallery