Watch this man!

Reduced to seeing through the purely photographic eye of his camera after losing most of his memory due to acute alcohol poisoning in 1977, Nakahira Takuma has been using photography as a means for reassembling rather than dissecting himself. The "new person" he eventually presented to us is sharp and lithe as a cat. In a lecture held on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition at Yokohama Museum of Art (see also vol. 3 of ART iT magazine), I attempted to position the still active photographer’s work in the huge framework of photography history.

In the meanwhile, Kohara Masashi had been following Nakahira with a video camera through his everyday for almost three years, and finished and unveiled (in 2006) his film "Kamera ni natta otoko: Photographer Nakahira Takuma". It is a deeply moving document that illustrates the uncertainties, and at the same time the moments of insight and resolution to deal with them in the photographer’s daily life. There is Nakahira Takuma, organizing his life by writing things down on a box of "Short Hope" cigarettes. Those spectacular photographs of steel towers, animals and homeless people that startled the visitors of the Yokohama exhibition — how did he take them?

Particularly unforgettable are the sceneries of Nakahira’s journeys to Okinawa. He has been visiting the island several times since he went there as a photography expert to a advocate a demonstrator, who was accused of murdering a police inspector based on newspaper photos, prior to his collapse. As soon as he recovered from the poisining, he went to Okinawa again, and tool another series of wonderful photographs. I especially like the one that shows a little boy playing casually with a dog on a beach, which is in fact a picture in which Nakahira Takuma realized for the first time the existence of his own son!

Taking photographs, however, is for Nakahira nothing but a necessary part of his process of getting himself back together, so it has nothing to do with sentimental kind of nostalgia. This also means that this recent journey to Okinawa was not a sentimental journey with the aim to pick up wome old memories, which became obvious also in a now legendary symposium scene with fellow photographers Moriyama Daido and Araki Nobuyoshi at at an exhibition titled "Okinawa Mandara", organized by Tomatsu Shomei.

Confronted with the title of the symposium, "The memory of photographs — the creation of photographs", the photographer poignantly expressed doubts about whether such happy-go-lucky terms as "memory" and "creation" were appropriate for discussing the reality of Ryukyu (Okinawa) under the continued military push of American imperialism. Shouldn't this topic be approached with Nakahira’s proposed idea of a "photograph as a document" — the photograph as a fragment of historical reality — in mind? Indeed, a brilliant remark.

When watching the video, Tomatsu Shomei remained the silent wise man, while Moriyama Daido got up from his deat in indecent haste, and Araki, who was scoffed at for saying that he was only attracted by the "passion" of Okinawa without any political issues when asked to what extent he was thinking about Okinawa, muttered something of emotional fellowship and how they all had been partying together the day before. Nakahira Takuma, as if totally unaware of such things (maybe he has indeed forgotten them), simply turned his face away. Even more than back when he put out the photography paper "Provoke", Nakahira has become the sturdy, stray cat sort of solitary provocateur.

Unobtrusively yet cautiously, Kohara Masashi remains on the heels of Nakahira Takuma, and makes it impossible for us to take our eyes off the "new person" in front of his video camera.