From August 25 to 30, Galerie Joseph is dedicating its first posthumous retrospective to Hozumi Nakadaira, presented concurrently at the Hobai-tei Pavilion in Tokyo's Hama-rikyū Garden. Two months after the closure of DUG, the Shinjuku café he founded, the great Japanese jazz photographer arrives in the city where he had never exhibited before.
On June 27th, in the basement of a Shinjuku building slated for demolition, DUG served its last coffees. Sixty-five years earlier, in 1961, a young photography graduate had opened DIG café in the same neighborhood, of which DUG was the direct heir: a place where people came to listen to records with the seriousness reserved elsewhere for concerts. Until the very last night, Miles Davis and John Coltrane watched over the tables. The prints were made by the owner himself.
Hozumi Nakadaira died on December 1, 2024, at the age of 88. His first posthumous retrospective, The Trajectory of Jazz, is being held from August 25 to 30 at Galerie Joseph on Rue Sainte-Anastase, and from August 28 to 30 at the Hobai-tei Pavilion in Tokyo's Hama-rikyū Garden. This exhibition, presented in two cities, is less about symmetry than about contrast.
Born in 1936 in Hongū, Wakayama Prefecture, Nakadaira graduated in 1960 from the photography department of Nihon University's Faculty of Arts. The following year, Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers embarked on their first Japanese tour: he was there, camera in hand. In 1966, his first trip to the United States brought him Coltrane and Davis. This was followed by Bill Evans at Top of the Gate in 1970, Thelonious Monk at the Village Vanguard, and Alice and John Coltrane at the Newport Jazz Festival. Five decades of darkened venues, dressing rooms, and backstage areas, with a rare consistency: he photographed musicians playing, never figures posing.
At his place, the photographer and the café owner are one and the same. In the early 1960s, Japanese jazz cafés were still considered dens of iniquity; Nakadaira invented the formula for the modern jazz café: a meticulously tuned hi-fi system, real coffee, and a volume calculated so that one could listen for hours without fatigue. DIG opened in 1961, followed by DUG in 1967, designed so that one could finally talk and drink there. Yukio Mishima, Shūji Terayama, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Haruki Murakami frequented it; DUG entered Norwegian Wood and never left. Sixty years later, listening bars in London, Berlin, and Paris are adopting, sometimes unknowingly, a grammar developed in these Shinjuku basements.
His images circulated far beyond jazz circles: record sleeves, book covers, international press. The Monk of the Village Vanguard appeared in Steven Spielberg's The Terminal in 2004; the 1970 Bill Evans in Bruce Spiegel's documentary, Bill Evans: Time Remembered. The bulk of his work is collected in JAZZ GIANTS 1961-2013, published by Tokyo Kirara-sha.
One unique aspect remains, giving the Parisian presentation its value. Nakadaira never shot for the art market. He worked for the press, for album covers, for his walls, and did not create a body of work in the sense that galleries understand it. In 2014, changes in black and white photographic paper deprived him of the values he sought: he stopped shooting, without looking back. The prints made during his lifetime are therefore rare, and these are the ones being shown. For some years now, museums, collectors, and galleries have been revisiting this work, long relegated to the realm of documentary, as if jazz had finally come to be valued also for what we see of it.
Two places, two temporal regimes. On Rue Sainte-Anastase, the Marais district with its late-summer bustle. In Tokyo, with the support of the city, a wooden pavilion has been erected in a garden whose paths date back to the Edo period, where the city's clamor stops at the gate. The organizers speak of movement and stillness. One can also hear there the two speeds of jazz itself: that of the solo, and that of the silence that precedes it.
Nakadaira admired Henri Cartier-Bresson and his concept of the decisive moment. Exhibiting his work in France was a long-held wish, unfulfilled during his lifetime. In 1993, his Giants of Jazz exhibition attracted over 27,000 visitors to the Konica Plaza in Shinjuku, and he exhibited annually in Japan until his death; Wakayama Prefecture honored him in 2013. It wasn't until two years after his passing, and the closure of the café that bore his name as much as his photographs, that the prints finally made the journey.
What is hung on rue Sainte-Anastase is therefore not just a series of portraits of musicians. It is what remains of a place, of a certain quality of listening, and of a way of watching those who play: waiting, patiently, for something to happen.
The Trajectory of Jazz. Hozumi Nakadaira, Photo Exhibition 2026
Galerie Joseph, 5 rue Sainte-Anastase, Paris 3rd. From August 25th to 30th, 2026.
Hobai-tei, Hama-rikyū Garden, Tokyo. From August 28 to 30, 2026.
