New Gaze

New Gaze is widely described as Takuma Nakahira’s first photobook after the rupture of 1977—when acute alcohol poisoning left him with severe memory and language impairments. In that aftermath, photography turns from style into necessity: a way to re-enter the world, object by object. 

If Provoke once tried to free photography from the authority of words, New Gaze feels like the reverse journey: before language can return, the act of looking must be rebuilt. The book brings together both monochrome and color images, alongside recovery-period writing/diary notes in some descriptions—an insistence on clarity, on “seeing the thing as the thing,” as if the world had to be re-learned from zero. 

And then there’s the objecthood of the book itself: entries often credit Kouga Hirano for the design, a figure deeply tied to Shobunsha’s visual identity—making the “new gaze” not only photographic, but typographic and tactile. 

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