Toshi-e

by Yutaka Takanashi (Photographer), Gerry Badger

Yutaka Takanashi's Toshi-e (Towards the City) is a landmark volume from one of the founders of the short-lived avant-garde Japanese magazine Provoke. The photographers associated with Provoke cultivated a grainy, blurry, black-and-white aesthetic, and Takanashi's pictures are grainy in the extreme. In contrast to his earlier, more upbeat Tokyoites series, the images here approach landscapes at skewed angles, as though shot from a speeding car, speeding perhaps "towards the city." Published in 1974 and considered the most luxurious of all of the Provoke-era publications, its brooding, pessimistic tone describes the state of contemporary life in an unnamed city, in a Japan undergoing massive economic and industrial transformations. This sixth volume in Errata's Books on Books series reproduces all 116 black-and-white photographs, along with an essay by the British photographer, writer and book historian Gerry Badger.
Errata Editions' Books on Books series is an ongoing publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to students and photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints or facsimiles but complete studies of the original books. Each volume in the series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or expensive for most to experience. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series spans the breadth of photographic practice as it has appeared on the printed page and allows further study of the creation and meanings of these great works of art. Each volume in the series contains illustrations of every page in the original photobook, a new essay by an established writer on photography, production notes about the creation of the original edition and biographical and bibliographical information about each artist.

Genres: Photography, Art

176 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2010

Reviews

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rightfully considered one of the masterpieces of the Japanese "Provoke" movement, the photos in "Towards the City" easily deserve five stars. When they're reproduced at full size, the grainy and ghostly images of the urban landscape are nothing short of luminous. Unfortunately, they're often shown at a half or quarter their original size so you're left to squint and imagine.

This series showcases the original photo-book as the art object, not the the photos. So you get loving reproductions of blank pages, binding, and staples while the images themselves get short shrift. It's insulting to Takanashi's astounding work that some blank pages are reproduced at full size while countless images are shrunk down so the publisher could fit them in as few pages as possible. Since the collection was never available outside Japan and remains rarer than hen's teeth, file this under "Better than Nothing." As well as "Missed Opportunity."

[David Gallin-Parisi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expansive/empty, urban/naturalistic, fashion shoots/sticking a camera out the taxi window, and black/white. This beautiful photography book captures Japan in the 1950's and 1960's, depicting a streamlined view of cities and the landscape swishing through them. There are people too, but they are like delicate buildings, adding structure to the Takanashi's perspectives. One of the greatest examples of futurism, capturing movement of machinery and urban life, while becoming something else altogether. Seek out these photos and lovingly produced book.

[Vogisland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Transition, restlessness, and uncertainty in early 1970s Japan. The images seem stuck between documentary and the void, like reverse polaroids fading as you look at them.