Provoke

by Matthew S. Witkovsky

The short-lived Japanese magazine Provoke is recognized as a major achievement in world photography of the postwar era, uniting the country's most contentious examples of protest photography, vanguard fine art, and critical theory of the late 1960s and early 70s in only three issues overall. Provoke is accordingly treated here as a model synthesis of the complexities and overlapping uses of photography in postwar Japan. The writing and images by Provoke's members -- critic Koji Taki, poet Takahiko Okada, photographers Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, Daido Moriyama -- were suffused with...