Yutaka Takanashi - Town [Machi] - 1977

Town

Yutaka Takanashi
Asahi newspaper company/1977/Japanese/303*423*25

A collection of works by Japanese photographer Yutaka Takanashi. Takanashi's commercial work from the 1960s, represented by such works as ‘Otsukare-sama’, his ‘Provoke’ activities with Takuma Nakahira and Daido Moriyama, his outstanding camera work and photographic theory shown in both his public and private life, and his ideas came to fruition in the collection ‘To the City’ (including ‘Tokyoites’) in 1974. After that, he changed the stage from ‘city’ to ‘town’ and immersed himself in activities to photograph ‘downtown’ in ‘colour’, taking buses and streetcars with a large camera on his back. Three years later, in 1977, he published a collection of his photographs. Tokyo was becoming increasingly ‘urban’ in the post-war period of rapid growth. In this Tokyo, there are still ‘Shitamachi’ areas where traditions and customs from the Edo period remain strong, and in the words of Shotaro Ikenami: ‘When you see these things still faintly breathing in a corner of a destroyed Tokyo, Tokyoites of old breathe a sigh of relief’. Takanashi may have felt this way. An introductory work by a great photographer who would go on to look at the ‘city’ from a variety of perspectives and philosophies. (Included in The Japanese Photobook 1912-1990)