On 10 July it was Marcel Proust's birthday. I am still reading À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past... or A la Búsqueda del Tiempo Perdido, as I am reading it in Spanish), taking my time with it, trying to read the way the book itself shows its reality: in detail, with caution, creating a world with every sentence. It is not easy or fast, but as one of the people in this article says "Proust sought to translate into words a phenomenology of human experience." Perhaps it is because this is also my own obsession (one which doesn't easily let me focus on academic knowledge) but I find Proust's work not only extraordinary but moreover essential; as someone who feels, remembers, thinks, experiences and lives. 

What can photography as a field and photographers say about the time and place they live in? This is not the central question the exhibition ponders, but rather it is a question that connects the social and political context in which Japanese photography developed betweek 1968 and 1979, and that of the world nowadays. The Japanese artists and photographers whose works and ideas are depicted in this exhibition are preoccupied with the particular sociocultural setting of their time, just after the political struggles of student protests, the social climate of distrust by the Japanese Left and the masses in the face of a rapidly changing social, political and economic climate of the Japan of the 1970s. What can this tell us about our seemingly very different contemporary world?