Every photographer has an origin story, and mine has a name on it. This is the man who is the reason I hold a camera.

In Tokyo, at the National Museum of Modern Art, I walked into an exhibition whose title was two ideas standing side by side: fire, and flood. Inside was Nakahira Takuma. He co-founded Provoke, the three-issue journal that bent Japanese photography, and helped invent its famous look, rough, blurred, out of focus. Then, at the height of that style's fame, he killed it, argued photography should be as plain as an illustrated botanical dictionary, and said he burned most of his own negatives. Fire, twice. In 1977 a collapse took his memory and his writing. What it didn't take was the photography: for nearly forty years he photographed his Yokohama neighborhood every single day, in color, as proof that he existed. A diar ...