Kazuo Kitai

The shape of an LP, this is the first book by Japanese photographer Kazuo Kitai, documenting Zengakuren student protests at the Yokosuka Naval Base in 1964. Interestingly, several blurred and grainy pictures would seem to presage the work of the Provoke photographers. According to Kitai, both Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira - the founders of Provoke - were huge admirers of the book. Moriyama in fact instructed his students to buy this book.

In this new series, Kazuo Kitai revisits his own photographic archives: faces, bodies under tension, marching crowds, fragments of resistance. Known for documenting the protest movements in Japan during the 1960s, he now chooses to reactivate these images through a radical gesture.

By tearing his silver prints and covering them with paint, Kitai transforms photography into raw material. The documentary becomes abstraction; the image becomes a surface for a hybrid form, somewhere between calligraphy and painting. This work marks a break in his practice: it is no longer about bearing witness, but about reinterpretation.

In these black-and-white photographs, we see helmeted men, workers, police officers, students, inhabited streets, and suspended objects. The artist overlays them with vivid colors and inscribes the Japanese characters “I,” “RO,” and “HA”, the first syllables of the traditional kana order, the equivalent of the “A-B-C” or “B.A.-BA” in Latin script. A return to fundamentals, further emphasized by the numbers “1, 2, 3,” typically recited as a countdown before setting something in motion.

Aesthetically, the work merges the stark documentary rigor of Kitai’s early street and vernacular photography with the tactile immediacy of manual mark-making. The hand-applied pigments alter the tonal hierarchy of the silver gelatin prints, subverting objective record-keeping in favor of a poetic, dreamlike atmosphere. The resulting plates oscillate between the tangible reality of the original scenes and an internal, psychological landscape, creating a tense and evocative dialogue between photography and painting.

A manifesto in book form, at the intersection of memory, painterly gesture, and renewal.