[6] Nakahira and the other Provoke members were well known for what was termed their "are, bure, boke" (rough, blurry, and out of focus) style, associated with spontaneity and thus supposedly a more direct confrontation with reality in that it would circumvent conscious control.
[9][10] Vartanian describes the volume as exemplary of Provoke's vision and concept of photography in Nakahira's use of the are, bure, boke style, but also for presenting full-bleed snapshots of anonymous corners of Tokyo that either cross over or abut each other at the book's gutter.
[11] However, cultural historian Franz Prichard reads the book as intimately concerned with the social circumstances of 1970s Tokyo by considering the volume's relationship Nakahira's perspective on fukei-ron (landscape discourse).
[12] This perspective on contemporary landscape as menacingly homogeneous and tied to capitalist geopolitics becomes clear in Nakahira's comments during the 1970 roundtable: Scholars including Prichard, film historian Yuriko Furuhata, art historian Ken Yoshida, and curator Charles Merewether highlight the importance of this critique of the effects of Japanese rapid-growth-era capitalism and its pursuit of progress on the Japanese landscape in 1970 for Provoke generally, but especially for Nakahira.
Against this appropriation of his earlier style, Nakahira gathered together images of urban detritus that Yoshida describes as "records of effacement and exhaustion—taken at sites of dilapidation and depression incapable of supporting adequate life...Deracinated things fail to establish a cohesive whole or a syntactic logic as remnants loiter meaninglessly in a state of any-space-whatever: and old electric pole, a canted shot of a sedan, trash, a dead fish.
"[21] Prichard identifies this incident as an important inflection point in Nakahira's post-Provoke practice that leads him to take a critical stance toward his idealistic belief in the ability of a particular style to avoid co-optation by the forces of commodification.
[22][23] Accordingly, the installation grew over the course of the week, lending the work a performative element that historian and curator Yuri Mitsuda argues Nakahira himself saw as transforming his photographs into actions, exploring the "relationship surrounding 'I who sees' and 'I who is seen.'
Mitsuda thus reads the project as an abandonment of universality, while Prichard expands on this stance to position it as a method for critiquing of local urban media ecologies through the example of Paris in 1971.
[25] It is widely understood that the shift effected in this volume toward the idea of a dictionary was an attempt to strip away the authorial hand and present the world around Nakahira in a more stark and revealing form, but the interpretation of what that means remains contentious.
"[29] Prichard points to how these already existing texts and images, published in other sources and arranged by date rather than theme, follow the logic of an illustrated dictionary by both denying the hand of the author in organizing the parts and by leaving the assembled elements as fragments, void of an overarching meaning.
Yet in relating this methodology to that of Nakahira's 1971 Circulation work, and further noting that these images and texts were previously published in the Japanese mediasphere, Prichard sees Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary as a continuation of the critique of media ecologies.
Considering his interest in problems of politics, infrastructure, and media, both photography historian and critic Rei Masuda and Prichard read these projects as seeking connections between Japan and Southeast Asia under the conditions of Cold War geopolitics and the 1970s discourse of the Third World.
These ideas proved influential not only for Nakahira, but also for Shōmei Tōmatsu, who was also photographing Okinawa around this time, and the Japanese documentary film collective Nihon Documentarist Union.
Curator and photo critic Kuraishi Shino and Masuda, however, argue that in spite of any stylistic differences with his earlier work, Nakahira's post-1977 practice should be understood as a conceptual continuation of the project he embarked on in 1973 with Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary.