Provoke
Today, when words have lost their material base—in other words, their reality—and seem suspended in mid-air, a photographer’s eye can capture fragments of reality that cannot be expressed in language as it is. He can submit those images as a document to be considered alongside language and ideology. This is why, brash as it may seem, Provoke has the subtitle, ‘provocative documents for thought.’
-- Manifesto of the Provoke Group by Kohi Taki, Takuma Nakahira, Takahiko Okada, Yutaka Takanashi, and Daido Moriyama
Provoke was a photography magazine in Japan it rejected glossy documentary style photographs and refers mainly to the the influence post-war had on photography. The images were often grainy and disorderly reflecting the social troubles going on across the nation and it contrasted with the glossy imagery seen in commercial magazines. This included three main photographers Yutaka Takanashi, Takuma Nakahira and Daido Moriyama, however they only ever published three issues of this magazine. The mission of Provoke was to create a new photographic language that could be used an interpretation for written words, the Provoke series was very much open to anyone's interpretation they could read it how they wanted too because it was its own form of writing at the time.
Diado Moriyama
Diado Moriyama is one the photographers who was involved with the provoke series. He likes to find desires, desires that people have, his own desires and he likes to capture all of these desires. When looking at Diado Moriyama's work I find some of them to be quite eerie in a few of his images they are very grainy and out of focus making them quite difficult to make out, this comes across as quite eerie and dark it gives them the feeling of being very mysterious. His work is simplistic and he always uses a compact camera he doesn't use a big SLR or DSLR camera as he feels it may make some people feel uncomfortable if they were to see tje bigger camera.
Yutaka Takanashi
Takuma Nakahira
My Provoke Response
This is my response to Provoke, I took inspiration from Diado Moriyama and the rest of the people involved within the Provoke project. My images are similar to the style of provoke with slight movement and on the focus on people but my images are less grainy and my images aren't trying to convey a bigger message much like a lot of the provoke images, also within my images my style of taking the images and the use of black and white make them similar to the provoke project. My images are framed quite well some of them are close-ups and some are