Kazuo Kitai – Agitators (2012)

In the early 1960s, a rebellious young Kazuo Kitai, having dropped out of Nihon University’s photography course after just six months, set out to make a photobook inspired by French New Wave cinema, one that would weave street demonstrations together with scenes of ordinary city life. He poured everything into that project, published in 1965 as Teiko (“Resistance”), documenting protests against the U.S. military presence in Yokosuka.

He planned a follow-up, Kagekiha (“Agitators”), but Teiko sold poorly and left him broke. Disheartened, he returned to Kobe and turned his camera on the city’s dockworkers instead. Yet Teiko had already caught the attention of student protest leaders in Tokyo, who invited Kitai back to document their escalating clashes with police and authority firsthand. What followed was a six-year immersion in the front lines of Japan’s 1960s protest movements, his photographs taken between 1965 and 1968 at flashpoints including Haneda, Oji, Yoyogi, and Hibiya in Tokyo, and Sasebo in Kyushu, spanning anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, protests against visiting American nuclear vessels, opposition to the Japan–Korea treaty, and clashes over a local tram line closure.

Published decades later by Zen Foto Gallery in the same large format Kitai used for Teiko, Agitators finally brought this body of work together as a standalone volume. Kitai’s early protest photography, raw, immediate, and shot from inside the crowd rather than at a documentary distance, would go on to influence the Provoke generation of photographers, including Takuma Nakahira and Daidō Moriyama. Kitai later shifted toward rural and everyday urban subjects, winning the Ihei Kimura Memorial Award for his 1970s series Mura-e, but Agitators remains a vital record of his beginnings, and of a turbulent decade in Japanese history, seen from the front line.

Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. 2012. 295 x 295 mm. Around 60 pages. Very good condition. Texts in Japanese.