Featuring an extensive selection of photographs from the José Luis Soler Vila Collection, which are displayed in the Sala Noble and Espacio ArteSonado, this exhibition brings together and summarises the main contributions made by photographers active in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s to the photography revolution in post-World War II Japan.
Grouped together as part of the Vivo cooperative (1959–61) – meaning ‘life’ in Esperanto and inspired by the European agency Magnum – and the magazine Provoke (which only brought out three issues between 1968 and 1970), the fifteen photographers selected gave shape to an avant-garde, experimental and uninhibited visual and thematic universe with a marked personality.
In a country in the midst of deep social change and a growing and unstoppable economic take-off, these nonconformist and radical photographers rejected direct, documentary and objective photography as a suitable language for capturing Japan's new reality. Instead, their images emerged as a subjective expression of the photographer's contemporary experience and a new and different language for creating ‘provocative materials for thought’, as the subtitle of the Provoke magazine stated. This invitation to reflect on identity, tradition, urban life, anti-American protests, the body and sex was conveyed through contrasting, out-of-focus or blurred photographs with unusual angles of view and textural effects in an aesthetic that enjoyed longstanding importance in Japan and earned major international recognition.
Selected from these photographers’ most important series and arranged according to conceptual and iconographic affinities, the photographs on display here are designed to reveal a fundamental creative period in contemporary Japanese art that will surprise and fascinate Western viewers in equal measure.
More information: Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga