Styles / Street & snapshot
Provoke and are-bure-boke
- Key: a lamp, sign or screen, about 40° to the camera’s left, soft.
No reflector or fill: let the shadows fall to black.
Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.
The photographs that define it are still in copyright, so they are linked below rather than shown.
Grainy, blurred, out-of-focus, high-contrast black-and-white pictures of Tokyo's streets, roadsides, highways and rooms, often at night, made by the circle of the magazine Provoke (1968–69) and carried on into the early 1970s. Shot fast, often without looking through the viewfinder, tilted and cut off, then printed hard, they refuse clear information: are-bure-boke ('rough, blurred, out of focus') was meant to tear photography away from tidy photojournalism and from the clean image of the modern city.
How the look is made
- Shoot fast, often without the viewfinder, from the hip or a moving car, and let chance set the frame.
- Let the picture go rough, blurred and out of focus; sensation matters more than information.
- Tilt the frame and cut things off at the edges; refuse a balanced composition.
- Work in the dark and into glare: night streets, neon, headlights, dim rooms.
- Print hard, crushing the blacks and burning out the whites, and keep the grain.
- Publish in sequences, in small magazines and photobooks, beside poetry and criticism.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: a lamp, sign or screen, about 40° to the camera’s left, soft.
- No reflector or fill: let the shadows fall to black.
- Shadow depth
- Shadows with no fill at all that fall to pure black with no detail, so parts of the subject disappear.
- Highlights
- The brightest parts burn out to pure white with no detail, on purpose or because the light was too strong.
How the style is lit
- Street lights, neon and headlights at night, the film pushed to its limit.
- Shooting straight into a lamp or the sun until the lens flares and the highlights burn.
- Dim rooms, bars and hotel interiors with a single practical light.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- Then
- 28–50 mm · f/2–f/8 · 1/500–1/8 s · ISO 400–3200 on full frame, inferred from the gear and the look. Wide apertures and slow, blurring speeds, about f/2–f/8 at 1/500–1/8 s, are inferred.
- Focal length
- A wide view; near things loom and lines stretch towards the edges.
- Focus
- A soft glow around highlights; edges never quite sharp.
- Rendering
- Light striking the lens: flares, streaks and lifted contrast.
- Angle
- The horizon deliberately off level (Dutch angle).
- Distance
- Within arm’s reach: faces, hands and details fill the frame.
- The photographer
- Shot from the hip, hidden or unnoticed.
- Balance
- Tilted lines and oblique movement drive the picture.
- Crop & fill
- The edges cut into the subject: heads, limbs or objects run out of frame.
- Instant
- A casual, unplanned instant, taken quickly.
- Duration
- Moving things smeared across the frame.
Direct
No one is posed: figures are glimpsed in passing, walking away, seen from behind, cut off by the frame edge or smeared by movement; the few who turn to look at the camera, over a shoulder or across a counter, seem caught off guard. Often there is nobody at all, only roads, signs and lights.
- Without a pose
- No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).
- The moment
- People photographed as they are, unaware or unconcerned.
Style the set
Nothing is styled: strangers in the clothes of the street (school and work uniforms, caps, coats), and roads, bars, rooms and neon signs just as they were met; nothing is moved, dressed or added for the picture.
- How much is styled
- Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Finish
- Monochrome
- A black-and-white scale pushed towards pure black and pure white, with few middle greys.
- Film
- A small handheld camera: quick, mobile, grainy when pushed.
- Texture
- Film grain or noise you can see at normal size.
- Shown as
- Pictures made and shown as a set.
- Shown in
- The book as the main form of the work. Pictures made for magazine pages and spreads.
Stay away from clean & noiseless, heavy retouching, soft studio light, soft monochrome, corrected perspective, objective & scientific, held highlights, open, filled shadows and fully art-directed.
Before you shoot it
When the look is borrowed for a brief, use only its means (grain, blur, tilt, contrast, night light), credit the Provoke photographers as the source, and consider commissioning photographers who work in this tradition.
Where to see it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
In copyright, so linked
- ON THE ROAD , Daidō Moriyama, 1969. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
- La nuit 1 , Takuma Nakahira, ca. 1968. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
- KARIUDO (Hunter) , Daidō Moriyama, 1968. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
With other styles
Pairs with New York street photography.
The opposite: New Topographics. Where New Topographics stands back, level and sharp in flat light, Provoke lurches in close and blurred at night; use one to test how much the other's calm or nerve the brief can take.
The opposite: French humanist photography. The humanist decisive moment is clean, level and composed; Provoke refuses all three, so use it when the brief wants unease rather than charm.
Pairs with Diaristic snapshot photography. The diaristic snapshot shares the rough, unpolished frame but turns it on friends and lovers; borrow it to make Provoke's roughness intimate rather than anonymous.
Sources
- Provoke (magazine), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provoke_(magazine) (1968–1969, three issues of 1,000 copies; founders Taki, Nakahira, Takanashi, Okada; Moriyama from no. 2; subtitle 'provocative materials for thought'; Anpo protests and student radicalism; grainy, blurry, high-contrast are-bure-boke; halftone printing; 1970 book First, Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty; influence on Japanese photography of the 1970s and 1980s)
- Takuma Nakahira, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takuma_Nakahira (1938–2015; co-founder 1968; For a Language to Come 1970; are, bure, boke as 'rough, blurry, and out of focus' and bypassing conscious control; turned away from it with Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary, 1973)
- Daidō Moriyama, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daid%C5%8D_Moriyama (born 1938, living; joined Provoke with no. 2 in 1969; Japan: A Photo Theater 1968, Farewell Photography 1972, A Hunter 1972 with Stray Dog, Misawa 1971; influences include William Klein and Shōmei Tōmatsu; shoots without the viewfinder; Hunter pictures taken while driving past)
- Kōji Taki, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dji_Taki (1928–2011; co-founder and main funder; the magazine as 'an attempt to fill the gap between politics and art')
- Yutaka Takanashi, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutaka_Takanashi (born 1935, living; member of the Provoke collective; Toshi-e, Izara Shobō 1974)
- Japan Theater (Daido Moriyama), SFMOMA essay: https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/99.688/essay/japan-theater (Nakahira started Provoke in 1968, where Moriyama's work appeared; the high-contrast printing of this period)
- Room (Daido Moriyama, 1969), Art Institute of Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/202855 (the image first appeared in the second issue of Provoke; series of nudes made in hotel rooms in 1969)
- SFMOMA object pages for Moriyama, ON THE ROAD (1969) and KARIUDO (Hunter) (1968), and Nakahira, La nuit 1 (ca. 1968, photogravure): https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Daido_Moriyama/
- Daido Moriyama, exhibition texts, Photo Élysée, Lausanne, 2024 (PDF): https://elysee.ch/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Daido_Moriyama_Textes_EN.pdf ('Moriyama's photographic vocabulary included his favoured Kodak Tri-X film as well as zoom lenses, high-contrast papers, photocopiers, and TV stills'; in New York in 1971 'He carried a half-frame camera, allowing twice the number of exposures')
- Daidō Moriyama, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daid%C5%8D_Moriyama (often shoots without looking through the viewfinder; are-bure-boke)
- Provoke (magazine), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provoke_(magazine) (1968–1969; grainy, blurry, high-contrast pictures)
- Kodak Tri-X, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Tri-X (introduced around 1940 in sheets rated ASA 200 daylight; released in 35 mm and 120 in 1954; usually rated ISO 400; pushing to EI 800 gives very good results, EI 1600 needs more sophisticated processing, stand development reaches EI 3200)