Galerie Priska Pasquer Goebenstr. 3 50672 Cologne Allemagne
Exhibition of the works of Japanese photographer Yutaka Takanashi, whom the gallery represents exclusively since the beginning of 2010.
In the first overseas solo exhibition to be devoted to his works since the mid-1980s, a selection of Takanashi's works from the period 1963 - 1974 will be featured.
Yutaka Takanashi was one of the co-founders of the legendary "Provoke" group which revolutionised Japanese photography at the end of the 1960s. Other members of this group included Daido Moriyamya - the subject of two past exhibitions by Galerie Priska Pasquer - and Takuma Nakahira.
The works in this exhibition were published by Yutaka Takanashi in 1974 in the two-part volume "Toshi-e" (Towards the City). This elaborate publication marked both the high-water mark and the end of the "Provoke" era.
While the urban images of the city of Tokyo still bear the hallmarks of subjective documentary photography, the landscape shots are wholly in the radical "Provoke" style, characterised in Japan as "are, bure, boke" - rough, blurred and out of focus.
With this rough, fleeting and highly expressive imagery, Takanashi and the other members of the "Provoke" group finally broke with the aesthetic of "photography as reportage" and its underlying notion that photography is capable of creating an authentic image of reality.