What this photographer did was to use everything in his power to push the photographic medium forward through the creation of photography collectives, theories, manifestos, lengthy critiques, and experiments with printing images in a variety of forms from the mid-1960s through 2010. His groundbreaking work birthed completely new styles of photography that he would literally burn to the ground as a rejection of all he had made.

“Now, as a result of this project, I can feel that the things that I say and the things that I do are beginning to agree with one another for the first time.”

One element of photography is that it is often regarded as having the ability to make a moment permanent. Circulation is a project from Nakahira that played with the idea that maybe it didn’t have to. This project from 1971 was created by Nakahira in Paris as a “living” work of art at the Biennale de Paris, a festival running from 1959 to 1983 that promoted alternative methods of creating art outside of the establishment.

The methods Nakahira used for his part in this festival to create Circulation: Date, Place, Events consisted of taking and printing images during each new day that he was there to put on display, then removing and discarding the previous day’s work. This was done to create images that he considered “live.” He used the term circulation to describe how he moved around Paris to create the work, how the images moved in and out of the darkroom before presenting themselves to viewers, and how those viewers circulated by the images as they were presented in an open-air exhibition.

“To put it concretely, I set myself to photograph, develop, and exhibit nothing but the Paris that I was living and experiencing. My project … was born from this motivation. Every day I would go out into the streets of Paris from my hotel. I would watch television, read newspapers and magazines, watch the people passing by, look at other artists’ works at the Biennale venue, and watch the people there looking at these works. I would capture all of these things on film, develop them the same day, make enlargements, and put them up for display that evening, often with the photographic prints still wet from the washing process.”

He printed around 200 images during each of the consecutive days the project took place, with a final total of 1,500 photos. These images presented the familiar subjects of street photography in a way that emphasized individual photos rather than curated sequences. Nakahira wanted to reject the traditional narrative flow of photobooks, focusing instead on each image as a standalone experience. The darkroom process was dragged into the outside world, transforming photography into something immediate and raw.

“Hilarity, terror, alienation, ooze, hyperreality” are the words Matthew W. Witkowsky of The Art Institute of Chicago used to describe how Nakahira’s photos commented on the stability, authority, and ego around him in Paris. Nakahira himself described “hollowness” and “despair.”

He recognized the irony of art that critiqued systems while relying on them for capital and materials, rendering artists powerless without them. His project stood apart because it existed only in the moment. “Viva La Muerte!” (Long live death!) was included in the work, encapsulating the project’s essence.

Born in Tokyo in 1938, Nakahira graduated with a degree in foreign studies and worked at a leftist magazine before meeting Shomei Tomatsu, who encouraged him to pursue photography. At 27, he left the magazine to devote himself to photography. In 1966, he opened an office with Daido Moriyama and soon co-founded Provoke magazine with Koji Taki, Yutaka Takanashi, and Takahiko Okada. Their grainy, blurry, out-of-focus style, are-bure-boke, became synonymous with the postwar avant-garde. Moriyama later said, “Takuma Nakahira was then, and still is, my only friend and my only rival.”

Nakahira’s voice combined theory and photography, reshaping Japanese photography with radical experimentation. But once are-bure-boke gained popularity—even in commercial photography—he rejected it, going as far as burning his earlier work.

In 1973, his essay Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary? questioned realism in photography, emphasizing sharp color contrasts reminiscent of botanical illustrations. This marked his move away from are-bure-boke toward critical writing. But in the late 1970s, he suffered acute alcohol intoxication, losing memory and much of his ability to write and speak. “Indeed, my body itself has been completely restored, but on the other hand, I am unable to remember almost anything and continue to live in a state of considerable mental anxiety… above all else, I continue to cling to the idea that I am a photographer. It is completely impossible for me to abandon that one point.”

His recovery inspired A New Gaze (1983), a book that linked his rehabilitation to rediscovering photography and language. Later works like Adieu à X focused on mindful observation of Yokohama’s streets and riversides, rejecting his earlier style. His 2010 book Degree Zero mixed rediscovered earlier images with newer work, tracing the arc of his vision until his death in 2015.

In his essay Can Photography Revive Language?, Nakahira wrestled with photography’s limits. “At one time it was declared that images had an independent meaning in themselves opposed to language, and a ‘language of images’ was spoken about as though it were real. Yet, these notions are surely mistaken. Images haunt language like a shadow, they line language and give it substance, and in some cases, they bring about the expansion of language.” He argued words are lifeless without lived experience - “a tree is a tree” - and that photographs cannot exist apart from the language and feelings attached to them.

“It seems Provoke has carried out one of its missions. Provoke has reversed the image as the self-evident and pointless proof that a tree is a tree, and, on the contrary, has presented images that raise uncertainty about the fixed meanings of verisimilitude, albeit rather slowly. Yet, even this has fallen into a kind of minor fashion now.”

What remains is Nakahira’s insistence on deep reflection: that photography should push beyond aesthetics into meaning, even if the search ends in failure.