At the Limits of the Gaze

The first English-language collection of Takuma Nakahira’s influential writings on photography.

At the Limits of the Gaze collects the writings of photographer and critic Takuma Nakahira in English for the first time. A crucial figure within the history of Japanese photography, Nakahira is best known outside of Japan as a founding member of Provoke, the experimental magazine of photographs, essays, and poetry, first published in 1968, and for his important photobook For a Language to Come (1970). Throughout a decades-long career, Nakahira raised incisive questions about visual culture and politics in both his photography and his writing. As part of a dynamic moment of artistic and political experimentation in Tokyo, he wrote on a range of topics hardly limited to photography: art, film, journalism, literature, politics, television, and more. Nakahira’s essays brim with urgency, relentlessly interrogating photography’s relationship to power, the connection between language and images, and the gaze. As editors and translators Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard write, Nakahira’s essays “both suggest doubt about, and possibilities for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world.”

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 164
Number of images: 12
Publication date: 2026-01-13
Measurements: 5.2 x 8.2 x 0.5 inches
ISBN: 9781597115780

Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015; born in Tokyo) was a photographer and writer. He graduated from the Department of Spanish at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 1963. In 1968, he cofounded the magazine Provoke with Kōji Taki, Yutaka Takanashi, and Takahiko Okada. His photobooks include For a Language to Come (1970), A New Gaze (1983), Adieu à X (1989), and Documentary (2011). He was also the author of many critical essays and books on photography, media, art, and politics, including Why an Illustrated Botanical Guide? Collected Writings on Images by Takuma Nakahira (1973) and Duel on Photography (1977). His work has been the subject of large-scale retrospective exhibitions at the Yokohama Museum of Art (2003) and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2024), and is included in the collections of other museums around the world.

Daniel Abbe holds a PhD from the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and is a lecturer at Osaka University of Arts.

Franz Prichard is an associate professor at Florida State University, author of Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (2019), and has taught at UCLA, Harvard University, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Princeton University.