Yutaka Takanashi: Toshi-e

Yutaka Takanashi's 'Toshi‑e' ('Towards the City') is a landmark volume from one of the founders of the short‑lived avant‑garde Japanese magazine 'Provoke'. The photographers associated with 'Provoke' cultivated a grainy, blurry, black‑and‑white aesthetic, and Takanashi's pictures are grainy in the extreme. In contrast to his earlier, more upbeat Tokyoites series, the images here approach landscapes at skewed angles, as though shot from a speeding car, speeding perhaps “towards the city.” This sixth volume in Errata's Books on Books series reproduces all 116 black‑and‑white photographs, along with an essay by the British photographer, writer and book historian Gerry Badger.