GENS PUMPS. Of. The Burjassot, 54
Per Amor a l’Art has the most important collection of post-war Japanese photography outside of Japan and the exhibition The look of things will be your showcase for a year at Bombas Gens. Until 2020 we can admire the work of a group of Japanese photographers who between 1957 y 1972 radically transformed photographic language. Following the exhibition The eyes of ten (1957) by Toyoko Tokiwa along with nine other photographers, the VIVO agency was born, ready to vindicate the subjective expression of the artist. The second shock would come just ten years later with the magazine Provoke (1968) –founded among others by Takuma Nakahira and Koji Taki– which was characterized by a very marked style known colloquially as are-bure-bake (grain, scanning, blur) that fled from perfection and “quality”. It is not surprising therefore that they influenced the movement Do It Your Self, in the creation of fanzines or on the scene punk posterior. We talk about leftist artists, but not marginal, living a decade of the 60 in which movements emerged that questioned the voracious development of capitalism and the impositions made on Japan, as a loser, after World War II. Soaked in context, These photographers who moved away from photojournalism to embrace art portrayed cinematographically, black and white, the Yankee soldiers surrounded Japanese prostitutes, consumerism (Coca-cola, Lucky Strike…) like detritus, the university revolts against the Security Treaty between the United States and Japann, the gestation of Butoh dance, a grainy eroticism, daily life in a Tokyo that was brutally urbanizing… Photography as an exercise of freedom. S.M.
