Flash Up — Seiji Kurata's Document of 1970s Tokyo
Flash Up is a sustained photographic record of the nocturnal and marginal zones of 1970s Tokyo. Originally published in 1980 by Byakuya-Shobo, it earned Seiji Kurata the Ihei Kimura Award that same year and remains one of the most direct and unsentimental accounts of that city's underworld in postwar Japanese photography.
About the Book
Kurata's camera moves through Ikebukuro and Shinjuku with the composure of a trained observer. The subjects are specific: yakuza, Bosozoku in street confrontations, ultra-right wingers at Meiji Jingu and on rural tour, nightclub hostesses, salarymen, car crash victims. The photographs do not aestheticize their subjects. Shot in medium format, they carry a journalistic clarity that distinguishes Kurata's approach from the more expressionistic work associated with his teachers Daido Moriyama and Araki Nobuyoshi. Where those photographers pushed grain and contrast toward abstraction, Kurata holds the image open — enough information enters the frame for a narrative to form in the viewer's mind without the photograph closing it off. A bleeding figure on a Ikebukuro street, surrounded by onlookers, while a well-dressed man in the crowd smiles directly at the lens: the image is documentary and strange in equal measure.
Kurata described the project in his afterword as rooted in the four years following the launch of Street Photo Random in 1975 — a period of deliberate attention to the overlooked and the contingent, working against the noise of everyday life rather than through it. The photographs in Flash Up are the accumulation of that discipline.
The 2013 Edition
This edition was published in 2013 by Zen Foto Gallery as a large-format hardcover with slipcase. It reproduces the original 1980 publication at high quality and includes two essays by Kurata in both English and Japanese. The edition is limited to 750 copies. At 383 × 265 × 30 mm and 184 pages with 140 images, it presents the work at a scale appropriate to the photographs' density of detail.
For buyers interested in the full range of Kurata's published work, Eros Lost is also available in the shop.
