“Grainy, blurry, out-of-focus” A small movement that continues making changes in the way of picture making.

Yutaka Takanashi and Takuma Nakahira, critic Koji Taki, and writer Takahiko Okada. Started a short lived magazine: Provoke.

Boke, usually: ‘bokeh,’ is the remainder of this stylistic trinity. It has been reduced to meaning the ‘out of focus’ rendering of a lens. Bokeh and ‘diffraction limited,’ form the recurrent, frequent topic in the online life of photography. A limited life, but it won’t die.

I’ve collected a set of videos so those of you at the table can have a brief, but worthwhile foundation of the provoke style.

Provoke (Purovōku) was an experimental magazine founded by photographers Yutaka Takanashi and Takuma Nakahira, critic Koji Taki, and writer Takahiko Okada in 1968. The magazine’s subtitle read as: shisō no tame no chōhatsuteki shiryō (Provocative documents for the sake of thought). Photographer Daido Moriyama is most often associated with the publication, but Moriyama did not join the magazine until the second issue. Provoke lasted only three issues with a small print run, but remains an important cultural artifact of the postwar era.

MoMA

A longer, more complete interview with Daido is this from Vimeo: