Keizo Kitajima

The “Actual” after the Political Movements

Kitajima entered photography not in the midst of the student and antiwar movements around 1968, but in the mid-1970s, when their charge still lingered in photography and magazines. In an SFMOMA interview, he recalled that after the worldwide political movements and protests of 1968, photography in 1970s Japan appeared to him as an “actual” and forceful medium—more radical than fine art.^*2 PROVOKE likewise emerged at the end of the 1960s, amid the Anpo protests, anti–Vietnam War demonstrations, and university conflicts, from a sense that established press and commercial photography could not answer the changes taking place in society.^*9 Research on the period also shows that the equation “photograph a protest and the result is a political photograph” had reached an impasse; around PROVOKE, photographers increasingly recognized that conventional protest photography could not itself change society.^*20 Nobuyoshi Araki’s Satchin and Daido Moriyama’s Accident, which Kitajima encountered in high school, and the Moriyama class at WORKSHOP that he joined after leaving university, were part of the photographic urgency that remained after that “season of politics.”^*25 For Kitajima, photography was compelling less as a vehicle for political slogans than as a medium that could take him into the street and respond on the spot to the people and cities of his time.

The Mechanical Image after PROVOKE

To describe PROVOKE simply as photography that aggressively asserted the photographer’s subjectivity captures only part of its connection to Kitajima. SFMOMA summarizes its legacy through are-bure-boke—grainy, blurry, out-of-focus images—together with ideas of subjectivity and anti-commercialism.^*3 Philip Charrier’s study of Koji Taki’s photographic theory, however, argues that PROVOKE also sought to question the “truths” produced by established knowledge and relations of power, using photography’s automatic character to expose them.^*10 Another study of urban photography in the 1960s notes that Taki and Takuma Nakahira treated the camera’s nonhuman, automatic, and mechanical properties as a way to escape artistic intention and preexisting meaning.^*19 PROVOKE therefore held two impulses at once: the force of the photographer’s body and subjectivity, and a desire for moments when the world registered as an image beyond the photographer’s intention. By 1975, when Kitajima entered WORKSHOP, the look of are-bure-boke had itself become a reproducible style. He later recalled that “handmade” are-bure-boke—scratching film and roughening the image in the darkroom—only brought the author’s intention back into the picture. He pointed instead to Nakahira sending color reversal film directly to the lab, and to Moriyama’s interest in the flash photography of Weegee and Katsumi Watanabe as a form of “machinism” based on even artificial light; Kitajima said he had no intention of continuing are-bure-boke himself.^*25 What he carried forward was less the rough surface than the unresolved question of what the camera might record before the photographer has decided what it means.

From Koza to New York

Koza, Okinawa, not long after reversion to Japan, was where Kitajima learned that the idea “let the machine decide and the author’s intention disappears” was not enough. In a later interview, he called it a mistake to believe that, as someone from mainland Japan, he could stand outside history as a “pure” presence and that accidents produced by the camera could likewise be pure. The act of photographing still contained the asymmetry of mainland/Okinawa and photographer/photographed.^*18 The problem extended to publication. As “Okinawa” became a larger issue the more he photographed in Koza, he found himself unable to show the work fully; afterward, he decided to photograph only in places where he was prepared to make the results public.^*1 Explaining why he chose New York in 1981, Kitajima said he imagined that a city where high-rise wealth and cultural power coexisted with poverty at street level might make the positions of photographer and photographed less fixed than they had been in Okinawa.^*25 The move from Koza to NEW YORK was therefore partly a search for a place where that relationship might not remain predetermined. In Okinawa he had been “the person from the mainland who came to photograph”; in New York he entered the same streets as a poor foreigner himself and tried to work in a situation that was not simply one of observing others from outside.

Photo Express: Tokyo

In Photo Express: Tokyo, Kitajima changed the exhibition at CAMP every month from January through December 1979 and simultaneously issued twelve sixteen-page booklets.^*8 In his own recollection, he sometimes turned the exhibition room into a darkroom, projected images directly onto sheets of photographic paper covering the walls, applied developer and fixer with sponges, and displayed the results in that state.^*22 Kitajima instead sought to compress the interval among shooting, developing, exhibiting, publishing, and circulation, allowing chance that escaped a prior intention to enter the work itself.^*23 At CAMP, photographs made in a given month appeared on the wall and in a sixteen-page booklet that same month instead of being culled for years before being shown as “finished works.” Keeping shooting and publication almost simultaneous was itself the method of Photo Express: Tokyo.

Direct Flash and Shooting without a Viewfinder

In Kitajima’s early photographs, close-range flash cuts faces and clothing sharply out of the night street, while shooting from waist level without fully looking through the viewfinder produces cropped bodies and tilted frames. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum identifies this as a defining feature of the New York period, where the method produced unpredictable compositions and hard outlines.^*4 Writing about CAMP 1979, Kitajima said that he wanted to make images through a “mechanical” method beyond his own control, using chance as a way to experience the world instead of realizing a preconceived intention in the photograph.^*23 He lit dark alleys with the same flash output and did not compose each person carefully in the viewfinder. The camera and light were expected to make an image before the photographer’s judgment of “how I want this to look.” Koza exposed the limit of that idea. Even if the image was handed over to the machine, Kitajima’s position as a mainland photographer pointing a camera at people in Okinawa remained embedded in the historical asymmetry of mainland/Okinawa and photographer/photographed.^*18 Reducing the photographer’s feelings did not erase the photographer’s social position. That gap became unavoidable in Koza.

NEW YORK

After moving to New York, Kitajima said he walked the city as a poor foreign photographer himself and felt less able to draw a clear boundary between his own position and the people on the street.^*25 Clubgoers, passersby, people living on the street, celebrities, and figures in advertisements all entered the same flow of shooting; clothing, faces, signage, and artificial light collided in the frame before biography or psychology could explain the subject. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum records roughly nine hundred rolls of film and some 35,000 exposures from this period, making the city itself a field of intensive photographing and selection.^*4 In Koza, the position of “a person from mainland Japan photographing people in Okinawa” had remained in place. In New York, Kitajima entered the same streets as a foreigner struggling with rent and living expenses, trying to keep the role of “an outsider observing the city’s people” from becoming equally fixed.

Eastern Europe and USSR 1991

In Eastern Europe in 1983–84, Kitajima gradually moved away from the hard flash of the New York period and began to photograph faces and upper bodies in natural light. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum describes this shift as a move from the stimulation of the street toward a stronger interest in individual faces.^*4 When he repeatedly visited the Soviet Union from late 1990 through 1991, he was struck by the rapid collapse of a Cold War structure that had existed since before he was born.^*2 Even so, he did not immediately gather those photographs into a book. He later said he intended to wait at least ten years so the faces would not be read only through the label “Soviet citizens just before the collapse.”^*4 The photographer who had shown pictures in the same month he made them in 1979 now waited more than a decade. He wanted the faces to escape the news headline “people just before the fall of the Soviet Union.”

PORTRAITS

Around 1991, after roughly fifteen years of street snapshots, Kitajima felt he had reached their limit and moved toward PORTRAITS, separating the face from the street.^*25 What troubled him was the mechanism by which portrait photography chooses one “most characteristic” face and fixes a person’s identity through that image. He called the convention of selecting a single flattering funeral portrait a “terrifying enemy” of portraiture.^*25 He therefore established a set of rules: an 8×10 camera, landscape orientation, a white background, a white shirt, and the same sitter photographed again each year. He avoided vertical framing because it could too easily turn the person into a symbol, and he removed the photographer’s freedom to decide that “the first year’s photograph is better.”^*25 Both pictures show the same person, yet neither can be singled out as the “true” person. Creating that condition was central to PORTRAITS.

Photo Express: Tokyo, 1979

Photo Express: Tokyo was made very differently from a photobook that retrospectively collects a photographer’s finished masterpieces. Twelve exhibitions and twelve sixteen-page booklets proceeded on the same monthly cycle in 1979, with the selection and printing of each issue leading directly into the next round of shooting.^*8 The Steidl/LE BAL facsimile preserves the original twelve-booklet format and emphasizes that the monthly exhibitions and publications were produced together.^*7 The close-up figure in the work held by the MFAH functions less as an isolated representative image than as one face among many arriving in sequence across the pages.^*6 Research on PROVOKE has stressed photography as a medium that encounters the city through paper, printing, and successive pages, not only through the formal perfection of a single print.^*19 In Photo Express: Tokyo, that media logic took the concrete form of producing CAMP’s monthly exhibition and sixteen-page booklet at the same time. Photographs made in Shinjuku only weeks earlier were returned immediately to the city on CAMP’s walls and through inexpensive printed booklets, before the photographer could later redefine a few of them as “representative works.”

NEW YORK, 1981–82

NEW YORK combines black-and-white and color photographs, placing clubs and streets, anonymous passersby and famous figures, within the same flow of shooting. In the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s NEW YORK Club STUDIO 54, direct flash cuts clubgoers and lighting fixtures with the same hard illumination.^*16 In East Village, the close crop does not fully isolate the figure from the setting; clothing and signage remain attached to the surface of the city.^*15 The photobook NEW YORK received the Kimura Ihei Award in 1983 and established Kitajima as a major figure in Japanese street photography. He later lost faith, however, in a method built around selecting the instant that happened to be cut most effectively, and he abandoned the approach that had first brought him recognition.

USSR 1991 and PORTRAITS

USSR 1991 was not published in a consolidated form immediately after it was photographed. After a 2007 exhibition and a 2012 photobook, the 2025 edition brought together ninety-five color photographs from the former Soviet Union with fifty-seven black-and-white photographs made in Eastern Europe in 1983–84.^*17 SFMOMA’s 12/10/1991 Moscow, Russian SFSR, USSR carries the date of the state’s collapse in its title, yet Kitajima avoided immediately circulating the work as news photographs of “citizens just before the fall of the Soviet Union.”^*21 PORTRAITS avoids another kind of headline: “this face is this person.” The same sitter returns a year later under the same conditions, and the images are given equal weight. USSR 1991 steps back from the label of a historical event; PORTRAITS steps back from the label that reduces a person to one representative face.

UNTITLED RECORDS, 2014–21

UNTITLED RECORDS is a serial photobook project of twenty volumes and 320 photographs published from 2014 to 2021, made in hard-to-name places across Japan from Hokkaido to Okinawa, including disaster areas in Sanriku and Fukushima.^*13 The publisher, photographers’ gallery / KULA, describes the project as emerging after the earthquake, nuclear disaster, and globalization had unsettled the distinction between the reality before one’s eyes and images arriving from elsewhere.^*14 Kitajima has said more recently that he became tired of making “interesting photographs” out of unusual people in back alleys or conspicuous clothing, and wanted to avoid a situation in which a photograph’s interest depended only on the novelty or attributes of its subject.^*25 In landscapes as well, he has emphasized seemingly “meaningless places”—a white wall whose subject is not immediately clear—or elements that make the viewer stumble over an easy reading of the frame.^*25 UNTITLED RECORDS therefore does not search only for symbolic places that instantly explain tsunami destruction or nuclear disaster. It deliberately keeps its distance from pictures that immediately answer, “this is a disaster zone” or “this is a ruin.”

Criticism of the Close-Range Flash

Kitajima’s early photographs were not immediately accepted as canonical examples of what is now called Japanese street photography. Materials for his retrospective at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum cite Daido Moriyama’s description of him as a “mugger in broad daylight” and criticism of his flash by Kazuo Nishii, then editor of Camera Mainichi.^*5 Blasting a person with artificial light at close range and taking the image before consent or psychological explanation could enter the encounter gave the same method that Kitajima valued for its chance effects an unmistakable aggression. In Koza, Kitajima himself recognized that “the person taking the photograph is stronger.” Moriyama’s and Nishii’s criticisms therefore concerned the act of firing a flash directly in front of another person, not simply a preference for rough or polished images.

Comparisons in International Criticism

When Kitajima has been presented abroad, his early and late works have often been connected to very different photographic histories. Reviewing a New York exhibition in 2009, The New Yorker wrote that his dark, uneasy street photographs brought Brassaï, Leon Levinstein, and Daido Moriyama to mind.^*11 Conscientious Photography Magazine, by contrast, compared the white background and frontal structure of PORTRAITS with Thomas Ruff while stressing a major difference: Kitajima photographs the same person repeatedly at yearly intervals.^*26 Kitajima has explained that this repetition was intended to produce the problem that “both photographs are you, and yet neither is you.”^*25 These are not claims of direct influence from Brassaï or Ruff. They show that international criticism has tended to place the early work in a lineage of close engagement with the nocturnal street and the later work in a lineage that tests the conventions of photographic portraiture.

The Rules of PORTRAITS

The move to the large-format camera was not welcomed without reservation. Reviewing the 2009 retrospective, Kotaro Iizawa read the path from shooting without a viewfinder and using flash to PORTRAITS as a continuing effort at “self-erasure,” reducing the photographer’s taste and compositional preferences; in the later work, he argued, that erasure was built into the procedure in advance.^*24 At the same time, Iizawa asked whether the logically ordered rules had diminished the contingency and danger of the early snapshots.^*24 PORTRAITS makes comparison possible under the same conditions each year, but the abrupt cuts and street-level collisions of the earlier work disappear. Iizawa’s criticism asks what may have been lost when the rules became more rigorous.

“There Are No Old Photographs”

In interviews around his 2025–26 retrospective, Kitajima has said that older photographs can be placed in new combinations through editing in the present and that “there are no old photographs.”^*25 The curator at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum followed that idea by avoiding a simple chronology and allowing early and recent photographs to move back and forth across the exhibition.^*25 Kitajima received the Ina Nobuo Award for USSR 1991 in 2007^*12 and the Domon Ken Award for UNTITLED RECORDS in 2022.^*13 The works recognized by major awards thus extend far beyond his early flash photographs, encompassing the Soviet and landscape projects of later decades. As in the 2025 publication that recombined Soviet photographs from 1991 with images from Eastern Europe, the date of exposure is not allowed to dictate the single “correct” way a photograph must be read.