First published in 1970, ‘For a Language to Come’ is Takuma Nakahira’s debut book. Radically breaking with the image aesthetic existing at the time, Nakahira brought about a breakthrough in contemporary Japanese photography from the late 1960s to the early 1970s.
The volume consists of over one hundred black and white photographs, some belonging to the series already published in the legendary magazine ‘Provoke’.
Through radical self-criticism, Nakahira would repudiate much of this early work in his 1973 essay ‘Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary’, and regarded it as something that must be surpassed.
This 2010 reissue of ‘For a Language to Come’ – with a new design – is an attempt to channel nakahira’s photographic starting point back into the present, to discover this work as the most vibrant, even today.
