For a city to come: The Material of Takuma Nakahira’s photography

This article discusses the work of the Japanese photographer Takuma Nakahira at the turn of the 1970s. Nakahira’s practice departed from the candid street photography (seen, for example, at the 1966 exhibition Contemporary Photographers: Towards a Social Landscape in the US), and sought means to not only document but also induce social and political change. Having a strong theoretical grounding in the specific discourses developing in Japan at that time around the notions such as the image (eizō), landscape (fūkei) and materiality (busshitsu), this practice is still significant to much of the present-day concerns with the potential of visual arts to envisage and produce new forms of urban inhabitation.