Seiji Kurata – Flash Up (1980)

Flash Up is Seiji Kurata’s landmark debut photobook, and one of the defining documents of Japanese street photography. Compiled from four years spent prowling Tokyo’s nightlife districts, the 190 black-and-white plates plunge into the city’s underworld: yakuza and their tattoos, bōsōzoku biker gangs, strip clubs, hostess bars, gambling dens, ultra-right-wing nationalists, and the drifters and hustlers who populated Ikebukuro and Shinjuku after dark.

Kurata trained in Daidō Moriyama’s independent photography workshop, but his approach diverges sharply from the grainy, blurred aesthetic of his Provoke-era mentors, Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki among them. Working with a medium-format camera and hard on-camera flash, he shot with an almost journalistic clarity, freezing his subjects in bursts of stark, high-contrast light against the darkness around them. The title itself nods to this method: flashing a light onto Tokyo’s hidden underside. The result, as critics Martin Parr and Gerry Badger noted in The Photobook: A History, is work of unusual polish and narrative instinct, images that don’t just document but suggest whole stories.

The book won Kurata the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award in 1980, launching a career that would later include the Kodansha Publishing Culture Award for Japan (1998). Flash Up remains his most sought-after title and a touchstone of the genre, cited alongside the work of Moriyama and Araki as essential viewing for anyone tracing the rougher, more confrontational edge of postwar Japanese photography.

Byakuya Shobo, Tokyo, 1980. 210 x 290mm. Softcover with obi and plastic cover, around 160 pages.

First edition. Condition: very good. Some marks of use/storage in the plastic cover, it is loosing pieces around edges and corners. As it can be seen in pictures it also has a broken part that was fixed by previous owner, but this does not affect the state of the book. The cover is in excellent state, only turning a bit yellow. Interiors are excellent. Texts in Japanese and English.