Publisher
Category
Information
- 80 pages
- 44 black-and-white photographs hand-coloured with paint
- Unbound sheets in a folder with a red rubber band
- 245 x 315 mm
- ISBN 9791096383566
- French, English, Japanese
- Dec 2025
With this latest series, Kazuo Kitai renews his practice. By transforming his archival images, he offers a new, sensitive and gestural reading, questioning the creative act at the end of a cycle.
In this new series, Kazuo Kitai revisits his own photographic archives: faces, bodies under tension, marching crowds, fragments of resistance. Known for documenting the protest movements in Japan during the 1960s, he now chooses to reactivate these images through a radical gesture.
By tearing his silver prints and covering them with paint, Kitai transforms photography into raw material. The documentary becomes abstraction; the image becomes a surface for a hybrid form, somewhere between calligraphy and painting. This work marks a break in his practice: it is no longer about bearing witness, but about reinterpretation.
In these black-and-white photographs, we see helmeted men, workers, police officers, students, inhabited streets, and suspended objects. The artist overlays them with vivid colors and inscribes the Japanese characters “I,” “RO,” and “HA” — the first syllables of the traditional kana order, the equivalent of the “A-B-C” or “B.A.-BA” in Latin script. A return to fundamentals, further emphasized by the numbers “1, 2, 3,” typically recited as a countdown before setting something in motion.
A manifesto in book form — at the intersection of memory, painterly gesture, and renewal.
Kazuo Kitai (born 1944 in China) abandoned his photography studies early on at the College of Art at Nihon University. Documenting the “Resistance,” the title of his first collection published in 1965, he is best known for his photographs of Japanese protest movements in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, he turned his attention to the residents of Osaka and Tokyo (Shinsekai Monogatari, Funabashi Monogatari), as well as to rural Japan. He has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award (in 1975).
Publisher
Category
Information
- 80 pages
- 44 black-and-white photographs hand-coloured with paint
- Unbound sheets in a folder with a red rubber band
- 245 x 315 mm
- ISBN 9791096383566
- French, English, Japanese
- Dec 2025
