Saturday, March 7
12pm
Free, no RSVP required

Please join us for a daylong program convened on the occasion of At the Limits of the Gaze: Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira, released by Aperture in November 2025. This landmark volume gathers, for the first time in English, the writings of Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015)—a figure best known internationally as a founding member of Provoke, the short-lived but seismic magazine of photographs, essays, and poetry that reshaped postwar visual culture. Across fiercely polemical essays, manifestos, and later reflective texts, Nakahira interrogated the image as a site of politics and perception, challenging the authority of journalism, the conventions of documentary, and the limits of language itself. Writing amid the upheavals of the late 1960s and ’70s in Japan, he called for a “language to come” adequate to a world saturated by media and marked by revolt—questions that resonate urgently today.

The program opens with a screening of Masashi Kohara’s 2003 documentary The Man Who Became a Camera, followed by a conversation with the book’s editors and translators, Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard, on the stakes of translating Nakahira’s thought. Presentations by Jung Joon Lee and Lucy Fleming-Brown explore the critical horizons of photographic praxis beyond Nakahira’s moment, while a performance by composer Aki Onda responds to its expanded field of practice. In collaboration with the Segue Reading Series, the day concludes with readings by Forrest Gander, accompanied by movement artist Eiko Otake, and Jennifer Scappettone, whose works extend Nakahira’s restless inquiry into new poetic and critical vocabularies. Together, these events elaborate the enduring force of Nakahira's thought—its insistence that images and words remain unsettled, open to doubt and reexamination, and capable of confronting the political and perceptual crises of the present.

12pm: The Man Who Became a Camera, directed by Masashi Kohara, 91 minutes

1:30pm: Panel discussion with Daniel Abbe, Lucy Fleming-Brown, Jung Joon Lee, Franz Prichard

3:30pm: Performance by Aki Onda

5pm: Readings by Forrest Gander with Eiko Otake and Jennifer Scappettone (as part of the Segue Reading Series)

Artists Space
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