Provoke (Purovōku, プロヴォーク), with its subtitle of Provocative Materials for Thought[n 1] (Shisō no tame no chōhatsuteki shiryō 思想のための挑発的資料), was an experimental, small-press Japanese photography magazine founded in 1968 by critic/photographers Kōji Taki and Takuma Nakahira, photographer Yutaka Takanashi, and writer Takahiko Okada [ja].
Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o suterō: Shashin to gengo no shisō (First Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty: Thoughts on Photography and Language),[n 2] through Tabata Shoten.
[7] According to historian Nick Kapur, the early 1960s saw political struggle in Japan reach its high point[13] because of the United States-Japan Security Treaty (ANPO for short in Japanese) was due for revision.
Meanwhile, the conservative government of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, himself a rehabilitated war criminal, was eager to push through the ANPO treaty and also to revise Japan's pacifist constitution.
A majority of the left wing within Japan opposed the ANPO treaty as a symbol of the US military influence on the Japanese political landscape.
The unpopularity of ANPO and the Liberal Democratic Party stretched across generations and ideologies, but it was especially evident in universities, where young people during the 1960s were becoming more and more disillusioned with the political situation.
Provoke was part of the photographic movement that arose out of the late 1960s and was motivated by the opposition artists had felt towards the traditional powers of Japan.
As a result of the political unrest, the Japanese government reacted by boosting public campaigns to spread their ideologies, mainly through the promise of a brighter future by encouraging increased consumption habits.
[23] It was also during this time where Taki felt that the dominant ideologies of the government had begun influencing the artistic choices made by Japanese photographers.
During the time of the Vietnam War, the works of Magnum photographers began circulating through the mass media, as well as other highly publicized galleries.
In his book, Kotoba no nai Shiko (Wordless Thought: Notes on Things, Space and Image), Taki wrote that it was an "attempt to dismantle the semantic environment" with the purpose "of trying to change reality".
[26]Unlike many of their contemporaries, Provoke decided to focus on the monotony of urban life by choosing architecture, disenfranchised citizens, and abandoned sites as their subjects.
Asahi Journal, Kikan shashin eizō (The Photo Image) and Design also served as platforms for avant garde photography in the 'are-bure-boke' style by Nakahira, Moriyama and others.
While Taki remained faithful to the initial vision of the magazine, Nakahira was beginning to question whether the abstraction of their methods was having concrete effects on the external world.
An early academic investigation into Provoke is Chapter 3 of Fabienne Adler's 2009 Ph.D. thesis "First, Abandon the World of Seeming Certainty: Theory and Practice of the 'Camera-Generated Image' in Nineteen-Sixties Japan" (Stanford University).
In 2010 a journal article on Daidō Moriyama put his photographic experimentation of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the context of his contributions to Provoke.
An article from 2016 by Gyewon Kim proposes that Provoke used paper as a metaphor for the city, thereby critiquing the Japanese state's imposition of homogeneous urban planning and design.
It shows that under the leadership of Taki and Nakahira, and inspired by the early writings on photography by Roland Barthes, the collective set out to create photographic imagery that could escape language and code.
[22] The Japanese Box: Facsimile Reprint of Six Rare Photographic Publications of the Provoke Era, published in 2001 by Edition 7L (Paris) and Steidl (Göttingen),[n 3] contains facsimiles of the three issues of Provoke (as well as Nakahira's For a Language to Come, Moriyama's Farewell Photography and Nobuyoshi Araki's Sentimental Journey) and a newly edited booklet of explanatory material in English.