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Needless to say, several of the accompanying images quickly made their way into my Inspiration Journal. I also saved the link for today’s newsletter...and then curiosity took over. I was aware of this revolutionary movement in Japanese photography, but only visually. I’d never actually researched how it initially came about and—to my great shame—had never heard Are-Bure-Boke, the term its members used to describe their approach. It means rough, blurred, out-of-focus, and it’s a school of thought that was shaped through the publication of Provoke—an experimental magazine that ran for only three issues and was founded by photographers Yutaka Takanashi and Takuma Nakahira, critic Koji Taki, and writer Takahiko Okada in 1968. Daido Moriyama—probably the most recognized photographer of the group today—joined on the second release of the magazine. The details behind all of this are available through the links below, so I’ll leave you to explore on your own. I want to talk about reactions: how we receive images and how they have the power to affect us on a physical level. I’ve written about this a few times already over the years, but it remains an object of fascination. It’s also a constantly moving target, almost a living organism. Most of you probably identify with this: the eternal battle between colour and black and white photography. We can dissect the technicalities all we want, we can analyze and decompose the motivations that should lead us to one versus the other...it remains a very personal and ultimately instinctive decision. I love colour. And I do get many questions and, ultimately, compliments on the way I process colour images (hopefully I don’t sound like I’m bragging...it’s just been a recurring theme over the years). But my knees buckle before black and white imagery. This is what swallows me. This is what leads me to question the fabric of reality. But it’s not just the use of black and white, it’s also the type of inherent, screaming chaos found in the pages of Provoke. A rough, blurred and out-of-focus interpretation of life. I go back to this over and over. And despite an overwhelming majority of my photographic work being in colour, if I were to choose a handful of images, they’d probably be monochrome and ultimately imprecise. Perhaps because this mimics the way our eyes move, twitching haphazardly over every moment we live; perhaps because it strikes at the heart of who I am, deep down. But whatever the reasons, those are the images that put a spell on me and force me to rise and fall and rise again. I can get as technical as I need to, when I need to. But I see this:
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