Provoke

The three issues of Provoke were published over just a few months, between November 1968 and August 1969, with restricted distribution of just a few thousand copies. Inspired by William Klein's book New York (1956), and informed by, in particular, French literary and artistic influences (Albert Camus, Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes, Antonin Artaud, Jean-Luc Godard...), Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, Kōji Taki, and Takahiko Okada devised the first issue, Eros. The third issue, Provoke 3-reproduced high up on LE BAL walls-did not have any special theme. A book-cum-testament, First, Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty is published in 1970 shortly after the group broke up.

The publication of Provoke occured in a context of dillusionment : at the end of a decade of fruitless protests and upheavals, militant photography had its day and collective struggle gave way to the solitary photographer's ideological, factual straitjacket, to seize a subjective, fragmented, and explosive capture of experiencing the world.

Since reality is by nature elusive in its complexity and its contradictions, photography here gave up its indexical power, to bring forward an aesthetics of indecisiveness and confusion. Becoming "eyes ourselves" to attain "something before form" (Kōji Taki).

A raw, blurred and grainy language (are, bure and boke) came in, pushing photography back to the outer edges of readability. Flow challenged the omnipotence of the unique image. Juxtaposition, collage and repetition completed with the authority of sequences and narrative. In the context of a fetishist consumer society, where the flow of mediatized images turns everything virtual, where art itself is becoming a system, depicting the impossibility of representing, honouring absurdity and chaos are the only possible gestures.

Without solving them, Provoke thus sheds light on the complex links between photography and language, art and resistance.

-Diane Dufour