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A Brief Introduction to Nakahira Takuma's “The Illusion Called the Documentary: From the Document to the Monument,” 1972
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
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This translation of photographer and critic Nakahira Takuma's (1938-2015) 1972 essay, “The Illusion Called the Documentary: From the Document to the Monument,” illuminates a crucial shift in Nakahira's understanding of both the profound limitations—as well as the radical potential of—photography. The essay's contemporaneous insights into the role of photography during the infamous Asama-Sansō Incident in 1972 offers a crucial counter-perspective that remains absent from existing accounts of this incident. Nakahira's essay demonstrates a pivotal moment within the development of a radical discourse of media power in the year of Okinawa's Reversion to mainland Japanese rule, shedding light on an undercurrent of critical perspectives that continue to resonate in the contemporary moment.
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References
Notes
1 See, for instance, For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968-1979, edited by Yasufumi Nakamori (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, February 2015), and Provoke: Between Protest and Performance—Photography in Japan 1960-1975, edited by Diane Dufour and Matthew S. Witkovsky (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2016). Kelly Midori McCormick has compiled a more extensive bibliography of recent scholarship and exhibitions related to Nakahira for SF MOMA's digital publication, “Focus on Japanese Photography” available online.
2 The “Discover Japan” advertising campaign featured blurred and shaken color photographs of fashionable young women in rural or rustic settings. Tomiko Yoda has discussed Nakahira's critique and the gendered modes of consumption enacted by the campaign in her essay, “Girlscape: The Marketing of Mediatic Ambience in Japan,” in Media Theory in Japan, edited by Marc Steinberg and Alex Zahlten, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017).
3 See Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics, (Durham : Duke University Press Books, 2013), the essay by Miryam Sas, “The Culture Industries and Media Theory in Japan,” in Media Theory in Japan, edited by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), Franz Prichard, Residual Futures: the Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), and Ken Yoshida, Avantgarde Art and Nondominant Thought in Postwar Japan: Image, Matter, Separation, (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021). Philip Charrier has also explored Nakahira's critique of realism in the essay, “Nakahira Takuma's ‘Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?’ (1973) and the Quest for ‘True’ Photographic Realism in Post-War Japan.” Japan Forum (September 14, 2017).
4 Translator's Note: Nakahira's emphasis added in the original. Nakahira cites the Japanese translation by Nakano Kōji (1925-2004), published in the August 1971 issue of the journal Bungei. To capture the specific nuances of the Japanese translation that Nakahira draws upon, I have modified the original English translation: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a theory of the media,” The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media, (New York: Seabury press, Continuum Books, 1974), 125-126.
5 Translator's Note: This phrase was the title of a roundtable discussion with Takanashi Yutaka, Nakahira, Kuwabara Kineo and others in Asahi Camera, April 1969.
6 Translator's Note: English translation from Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a theory of the media,” 102-103.
7 Translator's Note: English translation from Frantz Fanon, “This is the Voice of Algeria,” in A Dying Colonialism translated by Haakon Chevalier, (New York: Grove Press, 1967) 92.
8 Translator's Note: This essay was originally published in the July 1972 issue of Bijutsu Techō, and later collected in Naze shokubutsu zukan ka? Nakahira Takuma Eizō ronshū (Tokyo: Shōbun-sha, 1973). This translation is based on the version that appears in the 1973 essay collection.
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