Product Description
Paris, 1971. At a biennale where young artists from around the world had gathered, Nakahira Takuma performed an experimental project that dared to ask, “what is expression?” He attempted to indiscriminately document a limited reality shaped by “date” and “place” and then immediately re-“circulate” these in reality. This would be the first materialization of his own photographic methodology. In 1971 photographer Takuma Nakahira participated in the Seventh Paris Biennale for emerging artists from around the world. In his experimental project Circulation: Date, Place, Events Nakahira challenged himself to photograph his surroundings and in the same day exhibit the results for a duration of approximately one week. Indiscriminately documenting everything he encountered — the Parisian streets, the people and cars that came and went there, all manner of posters and printed matter, the installations in the Biennale including the constantly evolving display of his own work, the underground passageways of the subway, news wire reports transmitted by teletype machines, the constant flow of images on television, his room service breakfast in his hotel room and drying underwear — Nakahira exhibited the photographic traces of his daily experiences of Paris within each day. As the photographs proliferated day after day, the exhibition wall could no longer contain them, and Nakahira spread them onto the floor. Encountering difficulties with the event organizers, Nakahira tore down the exhibited photographs two days before the end of the Biennale. Despite reaching such an extreme conclusion, in an essay written upon his return to Japan, Nakahira would write, “Now, as a result of this project, I can feel that the things that I say and the things that do are beginning to agree with one another for the first time.” Nakahira saw this experience as a crucial attempt to materialize his own photographic methodology.
