Provoke (Purovōku, プロヴォーク), with its subtitle of Provocative Materials for Thought (Shisō no tame no chōhatsuteki shiryō 思想のための挑発的資料), was an experimental small press Japanese photography magazine founded by the collective of photographers Yutaka Takanashi and Takuma Nakahira, critic Kōji Taki, and writer Takahiko Okada in 1968. Daidō Moriyama joined with the second issue. Provoke was "a platform for a new photographic expression", "to free photography from subservience to the language of words", "that stood in opposition to the photography establishment". It has been described as having "lasted for only three issues, but had a profound effect upon Japanese photography in the 1970s and 80s" and "spread a completely new idea of photography in Japan." It was a quarterly magazine that also included poetry, criticism and radical photographic theory.
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Details
The three issues of Provoke magazine were published on 1 November 1968, and 10 March and 10 August 1969, each in an edition of 1,000 copies.
The Provoke manifesto declared that visual images cannot completely represent an idea as words can, yet photographs can provoke language and ideas, "resulting in a new language and in new meanings"; the photographer can capture what cannot be expressed in words, presenting photographs as "documents" for others to read, hence Provoke's "provocative materials for thought" subtitle. The visual style of the photographs in Provoke has been said to be, in Japanese, 'are-bure-boke', translated as 'grainy/rough, blurry, out-of-focus', a style already found in mainstream magazines such as Camera Mainichi. There were other comparable radical magazines and groups at the time including Geribara 5, which published three books.
On 31 March 1970 the collective published the book 4. Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o suterō: Shashin to gengo no shisō (First Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty: Thoughts on Photography and Language), through Tabata Shoten. A review of the group's activity, it is regarded as the Provoke No. 4 that is mentioned in No. 3. It contains photographs by Moriyama, Nakahira, Takanashi and Taki and text by Michie Amano, Nakahira, Okada and Taki.
Critic Gerry Badger has written that the "legendary Japanese magazine, Provoke, lasted for only three issues, but had a profound effect upon Japanese photography in the 1970s and 80s".
All three issues of Provoke appear in The Open Book, "a traveling exhibition that tracks the history of the photographic medium in the twentieth century through printed images in book form". Work from Provoke was shown in the 2016 touring exhibition Provoke: Between Protest and Performance – Photography in Japan 1960/1975 at Albertina in Vienna and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.
Issues
Publications reproducing Provoke material
The Japanese Box, published in 2001 by Edition 7L (Paris) and Steidl (Göttingen), contains facsimiles of all three issues of Provoke (as well as Nakahira's For a Language to Come, Moriyama's Farewell Photography and Nobuyoshi Araki's Sentimental Journey) and a newly edited booklet of explanatory material in English. The Box (an actual wooden box) was made in an edition of 1500.
A catalog for the similarly named exhibition, Provoke: Between Protest and Performance, was published in 2016 by Steidl. It contains photographs from Provoke and from other photographers including Shomei Tomatsu and Araki, as well as texts from that period and newly written.
Provoke: Photography in Japan between Protest and Performance, 1960–1975 was a temporary exhibit. It was on display January 28–April 30, 2017 at the Art Institute of Chicago.