At the Limits of the Gaze: Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira

NEW YORK: APERTURE, 2025

I copy-edited this collection of Takuma Nakahira’s essays (the first of its kind in English) translated and edited by Daniel Abbe and Franz Pritchard and published by Aperture. This is not to be missed, notably “Interlude”, in which Nakahira recounts the evening on which he set fire to his negatives on the beach.

Publisher description:

At the Limits of the Gaze collects the writings of photographer and critic Takuma Nakahira in English for the first time. A crucial figure within the history of Japanese photography, Nakahira is best known outside of Japan as a founding member of Provoke, the experimental magazine of photographs, essays, and poetry, first published in 1968, and for his important photobook For a Language to Come (1970). Throughout a decades-long career, Nakahira raised incisive questions about visual culture and politics in both his photography and his writing. As part of a dynamic moment of artistic and political experimentation in Tokyo, he wrote on a range of topics hardly limited to photography: art, film, journalism, literature, politics, television, and more. Nakahira’s essays brim with urgency, relentlessly interrogating photography’s relationship to power, the connection between language and images, and the gaze. As editors and translators Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard write, Nakahira’s essays “both suggest doubt about, and possibilities for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world.”