What does it mean to destroy one’s own artwork? For centuries, artists have destroyed their archives—either deliberately, as part of an artistic process, or out of frustration with the work. Japanese photographer Takuma Nakahira burned his entire archive in 1973, fearing it might “descend into cliché.” American photographer Matthew Brandt submerged his chromogenic prints in lake water, letting chemistry and chance corrode the image. For these photographers, destruction was not erasure but transformation: a deliberate act of reinterpretation that questioned the sanctity of the photographic document. With Iroha, Kazuo Kitai joins this lineage, turning his lens inward to dismantle his own archive.
Born in 1944 in Anshan, China, to Japanese parents, Kitai moved to Japan following World War II and studied in Tokyo. He is renowned for documenting the student protests of the 1960s and 70s, the Sanrizuka struggle, and rural life. His work emerged alongside the experimental Provoke movement—which included Nakahira—a radical collective that employed grainy, blurred techniques to offer a more subjective vision of post-Hiroshima Japan. Though never formally part of Provoke, Kitai shared their urgency and their refusal of documentary neutrality.
Now in his eighties, the photographer revisits his archives, unleashing their undiminished anger. The silver gelatin prints are torn and covered in paint splatters and calligraphic marks. We see closeups of protests and soldiers, but also still life details: an umbrella, a boot. The violence against the prints paradoxically gives them new poetic meaning. The photographs depicting turbulence themselves become victims of turbulence, before being rekindled with care, gaining new meaning as standalone artworks.
The title itself signals this return to fundamentals. Iroha refers to the first syllables of the traditional Japanese kana order, equivalent to “A-B-C” in Latin script. Paired with the numbers “1, 2, 3,” they evoke a countdown before setting something in motion. This is not simply deconstruction; it is reinvention. Kitai dismantles his archive to ask what remains when the documentary impulse is stripped away.
The intervention recalls other photographers who have used physical alteration to generate meaning beyond the image itself. Brandt’s lake water corroded his prints in ways both unpredictable and essential. Similarly, Kitai’s paint and tears do not distract from his subject but deepen it. The violence of the gesture—tearing one’s own work—parallels the violence embedded in the original photographs: bodies under tension, crowds in motion, the friction of resistance.
Yet there is something elegiac here, too. The act of destroying one’s archive can be understood as mourning, not for what was, but for what the image once claimed to represent. By tearing them apart, Kitai alleviates the burden of representation. The image is no longer fixed testimony but a surface, a starting point for something else.
The images are impactfully printed, sequenced, and designed by Marseille-based publisher Chose Commune. The format of the book—resembling a large protest leaflet, bound by a detachable red thread—reminds us that there is beauty even in seemingly fleeting and turbulent times, and that we can always revisit them and give them new meaning. Iroha is a manifesto in book form, positioned at the intersection of documentation, memory, painterly gesture, and renewal. It asks whether destruction might be a form of care: a way to honor the image by refusing to let it calcify into cliché.
Iroha, by Kazuo Kitai, is published by Chose Commune and available for 42€.
