Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan. By Franz Prichard. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 268 pp. ISBN: 9780231191319 (paper)

(Nakahira survived this illness and, after a lengthy period of rehabilitation, continued taking pictures; this material, however, is not considered in the book.) Addressing one of the most literary of the photographers of this generation—barring, perhaps, Nakahira's colleague Taki Kōji—Prichard judiciously and sensitively probes Nakahira's entwined photography and writings, highlighting a coherent reflection on the possibilities and limits of a subversive media practice. Prichard is aware of the difficulties entailed in accounting for such a configuration without either portraying avant-gardist idioms as wholly instrumental to politic, or disregarding these works’ medium specificity. [...]in advancing his “transverse reading” of such material, he calls for an ecological approach—that is, a comprehensive, interconnected understanding of media, environment, and society. The study thus will be of interest to a number of different fields: literary studies, art history, film and media studies, and urban studies.