Agitators

Kazuo Kitai had dropped out of university just six months after entering the Photography course in the Art Department of Nihon University in Tokyo. As he puts it himself: "I didn`t listen to anything my teachers said". He had been living in Kobe, and even as a teenager used to visit the ateliers and exhibitions of the Gutai artists who are so celebrated nowadays. This was a chaotic era, with trouble fermenting in student and worker movements. The rebellious young Kitai had an idea to make a photo book inspired by french film of the early 1960s; to create a document combining the street demonstrations together with scenes of everyday life in the streets of the same city.