At the Limits of the Gaze: A Conversation on Nakahira Takuma

Wednesday, March 4
5:30 pm @ Olin Humanities (Room 102)

Nakahira Takuma was a Japanese photographer and writer best known outside of Japan as a founding member of the experimental magazine Provoke, who wrote on a range of topics including film, literature, politics, television, and more across a decades-long career as a critic. A new collection, At the Limits of the Gaze: Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira, just published by Aperture, makes Nakahira’s criticism from the years 1970-1976 available in English for the first time. Co-editors and translators Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard will be in conversation to discuss Nakahira’s engagements with contemporary art, media theory, and cinema, as well as his relentless interrogation of photography’s relationship to power, and the connections between language, images, and the gaze.

Daniel Abbe teaches at Temple University in Kyoto and the Osaka University of Arts. He holds a PhD from the Department of Art History at UCLA, and has written on art and photography for Aperture, Japan Forum and X-TRA in English, and for Tokyo Art Beat, Bijutsu Techō and Popeye Web in Japanese. He also regularly translates materials related to the archive of the photographer Ōtsuji Kiyoji.

Franz Prichard is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at Florida State University and the author of Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (Columbia University Press, 2019). His current research develops transcultural and ecocritical approaches to the study of contemporary Japanese literature, photography, and other visual media.

For more information, e-mail [email protected].