Barricade

Barricade, published by Harper's Books in 2012, brings together previously unpublished photographs Kazuo Kitai made inside the student barricades of 1968 Tokyo, at the height of Japan's protest movement.

John Gossage designed the book as the launch title of Harper's Books' publishing imprint. The 80-page hardcover pairs the Barricade pictures with scanned pages from Kitai's first book, Resistance (1965), which documented protests near the American naval base at Yokosuka. Kitai's own essay, translated by Hiroshi Masaki, describes an approach built against the era's photographic conventions: blurred, off-kilter frames shot from inside the crowd rather than composed from a safe distance. The book accompanied Kitai's first American exhibition, held at Harper's Books, East Hampton, from August 18 to October 1, 2012. It was issued in a first edition of 1,000 copies alongside a signed deluxe edition of 36.

Kitai (b. 1944) began photographing in 1965 at age twenty-two. His student protest work is often cited as a precursor to Provoke, the short-lived magazine and movement that overturned Japanese photography's conventions of clarity and distance. He went on to document rural depopulation and construction labor across Japan. That later work was gathered in retrospectives, including a 2014 survey at the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art.