Franz Prichard’s research and teaching explore the literature, visual media, and critical thought of contemporary Japan. He is interested in the provocative forms of exchange among works of criticism, fiction, film and photography that offer vivid perspectives on urban materiality and ecological transformation. Prior to arriving at Princeton, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. 

His first book, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan, Columbia University Press, 2019, examines the rapid transformation of the urban and media ecologies of Japanese literary and visual media of the 1960s and 70s. This interdisciplinary study offers an in-depth account of the critical perspectives of filmmakers, writers, and artists who wrought novel aesthetic vocabularies from the intensive urbanization of the archipelago to question the Cold War remaking of Japan. Mapping the shifting relationships among urban materialities and subjectivities across works of documentary, fiction, and photography, his book illuminates the urban ecologies and the infrastructural aesthetics at the heart of the Cold War in East Asia and worldwide.

Select Publications:

Article: “The Feedback and Noise of Komatsu Hiroko’s Photographic Materialities,” Trans-Asia Photography Review, Vol. 12, No.1, Duke University Press, Spring 2022.

Book Chapter: “An Invitation to the Critical Literary Urban Vocabularies of 1970s Japan,” in Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies, edited by Lieven Ameel, Routledge, 2022.

Exhibition Essay: “Matsue Taiji’s Photographic Pedagogy of Unlearning,” (写真による脱学習教育, translated into Japanese by Nakano Tsutomu) in MATSUE TAIJI: makietaCC, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Nov. 9, 2021—Jan. 23, 2022.

Article: “An Introduction to Matsuda Masao’s ‘City as Landscape,’” ARTMargins, Vol. 10, no. 1, 2021

Book Review: Media Theory in Japan. Edited by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten, Pacific Affairs: Volume 91, No. 2 – June 2018
https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/book-reviews/media-theory-in-japan-edited-by-marc-steinberg-and-alexander-zahlten/

Essay: “An Illustrated Dictionary of Urban Overflows: Takuma Nakahira’s Photographic Thought and Practice,” Nakahira Takuma, Overflow, Case Publishing, 2018
https://www.shashasha.co/en/book/overflow

Translations: “Equivalents 2017. Takashi Yasumura’s 1/1 as the Reinterpretation of Alfred Stieglitz,” English translation of a critical essay by Minoru Shimizu, and “On 1/1,” an artist statement by Takashi Yasumura, in 1/1 by Takashi Yasumura, Osiris, 2017 http://www.osiris.co.jp/e/1_1_e.html

Chapter: “Takuma Nakahira and the Photographic Topographies of Possibility,” Spaces of Possibility: Korea, Japan, In, Between, and Beyond the Nation, edited by Andrea Arai and Clark W. Sorensen, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016
http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/SORSPA.html

Translation: “Can Photography Revive Language,” English translation of essay by Nakahira Takuma, unattributed, Provoke: Between Protest and Performance: Photography in Japan 1960-1975, edited by Diane Dufour, Matthew S. Witkovsky, with Duncan Forbes and Walter Moser, Göttingen : Steidl, 2016
https://steidl.de/Buecher/Provoke-Between-Protest-and-Performance-3043465255.html

Obituary: “Takuma Nakahira (1938-2015),” passages, artforum online, December 2015
https://www.artforum.com/passages/franz-prichard-on-takuma-nakahira-1938-2015-56902

Essay: “At the Limits of the Gaze,” Aperture, #219, Special Issue: Tokyo, Summer 2015
https://aperture.org/shop/aperture-219-magazine/

Essay: “On For a Language to Come, Circulation, and Overflow: Takuma Nakahira and the Horizons of Radical Media Criticism in the Early 1970s,” For a New World to Come: Experiments in Art and Photography in Japan, 1968-1979, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2015 https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300207828/new-world-come

Recent Organized and Co-organized Events:

Conference: “Russia/ Japan: Residues, Materialities, Environments: Trans-disciplinary Exchanges," Princeton University, Fall 2020

Workshop: “Photography from Contemporary Japan,” Princeton University, April 2019

Symposium: “After 1968 in Japan: Urban /Media /Critique,” Princeton University, October 2018
https://arc-hum.princeton.edu/events/19682018-cities-edge-after-68-japan-urbanmediacritique

Workshop: “Urban Materiality and Photography from Contemporary Japan,” Princeton University, July 2018
https://eas.princeton.edu/news/urban-materiality-and-photography-contemporary-japan

Conference: “Thresholds,” asia theory visuality, Princeton University, May 2018
https://atv.princeton.edu/2018-conference/

Conference: “Gaming East Asia,” Princeton University, April 2016
https://gea.princeton.edu

Conference: “The Invisible,” asia theory visuality, Princeton University, November 2015
https://atv.princeton.edu/2015/11/03/asia-theory-visuality/