NYAB Event - Kazuo Kitai “Students Workers Villagers 1964-1978”

Kazuo Kitai “Students Workers Villagers 1964-1978”

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects

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MIYAKO YOSHINAGA presents KAZUO KITAI: Students, Workers, Villagers 1964-1978, featuring over 30 modern and vintage gelatin silver print photographs by Kazuo Kitai.

With a quietly eloquent personal style, Kazuo Kitai (b. 1944) has chronicled a half-century of Japan’s shifting social landscapes. His work defined a new standard for documentary photography. This exhibition features Kitai’s own selection of 28 images from six different series created between 1964 and 1978 (Resistance, Kobe Dockers, Barricade, Sanrizuka, Somehow Familiar Places, and To the Villages). Recently printed on “aging process” photo paper, these prints exude a nostalgic warmth while maintaining superior archival quality. In addition, the exhibition also features ten rare vintage prints, some of which will be included in a forthcoming book published by Nazraeli Press.

In 1964, as a free-spirited 20-year-old college student, Kitai photographed a series of face-offs between antigovernment demonstrators and riot squads, capturing the raw energy of mass movements on aged films. The following year, Kitai self-published his first book entitled Teiko (Resistance), and in 1965, he himself became involved with the student movement. In 1968, he documented the occupation of a Nihon University building from an insider’s perspective. His subjects included painted slogans along with common objects i.e. umbrella, shoes, a clothes hanger — reminders of ordinary life amidst the chaos. Over the next two years he lived among the farmers of the Sanrizuka village in Narita at the peak of their resistance to the construction of the new international airport.