Forthcoming 2026/27Music Walk
Photographed and designed by Yasuhiro Yoshioka, this photobook offers an unprecedented glimpse into John Cage and David Tudor’s 1962 tour in Japan.
In the fall of 1962, American composers John Cage and David Tudor embarked on their first concert tour in Japan. Over six eventful weeks, they traveled across the country—Kyoto to Sapporo—performing alongside pioneering artists like Yoko Ono and Yuji Takahashi. Exchanging ideas on stage and across the dinner table, they fortified a connection that continues to resonate—in images as well as music.
“I have many pictures,” Cage wrote of their trip, thanks to a “photographer who snapped everything from the time I got off the plane.”
A radical young photographer, Yasuhiro Yoshioka, was hired to capture every moment of this highly publicized tour. He would soon earn praise as cinematographer to Oshima films like Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1968) and Boy (1969), but his own photography was being heavily censored at the time. Featuring high contrast and up-close images of the human body, his photographs were repeatedly removed from exhibition and eventually warranted his arrest. Yoshioka was self-publishing his first photobook when he was asked to turn his camera on another circle of this intrepid avant-garde.
Yoshioka captured some of the most recognizable images from the 1962 tour—Cage meditating at Ryoanji or Ono supine across the piano—but most of these photos have not been seen outside the archives.
John Cage and David Tudor exploring “Hell Valley,” Hakone, Japan. Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu FoundationAs the group performed just seven concerts in a little over a month, we mostly find them wandering the exquisite landscapes of Japan—from the gardens of Kyoto to valleys of Hakone—lost in conversation and the countryside. Immaculately dressed, clutching satchels full of sheet music, they stroll temples and forests, rest at ryokans and onsens, drink and smoke and daydream. And though documentary, these early images reveal Yoshioka’s natural eye for intimacy and theater—a talent that would soon define his career across media.
In commemoration of the tour, Yoshioka gifted four photo albums to Cage and Tudor. Each composer received a pair, organized between performance and sightseeing, uniquely curated to feature portraits of its recipient. Despite this everyday format, Yoshioka took great care in laying out the images. He pushes photos to the edge, crowds corners, mirrors pages, leaves other mostly blank. For decades they’ve remained in the archives of the Getty and Northwestern, largely forgotten. 64 years later, as chance would have it, these four albums are reunited and eager to tell this story again.
Featuring bilingual essays by Yoshioka and Cage, complimented by graphics scores and prose gathered from collaborators and friends, Music Walk—like the namesake score—is an intimate document of this formative autumn in the avant-garde.
Yasuhiro Yoshioka (1934–2002) was a photographer and cinematographer from Okayama Prefecture. Though championed by his colleagues across the avant-garde—from Shuzo Takiguchi to Hiroshi Teshigahara—his early photography of abstract genitalia was widely censored. By the late sixties, he was more widely known as cinematographer to Oshima’s greatest New Wave films (Boy, Death by Hanging, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief), but he continued to release his photography through a series of books: Yasuhiro Yoshioka (1963), Bestiality: The Third Venus (1971), and Sodom’s Paradise (1971). Yoshioka also contributed photography to Shuji Terayama’s Throw Away Your Books, Go Out into the Streets (1967), illustrated by Tadanori Yokoo. He also directed his own art films, including a documentary about his lifelong friend and collaborator, Tetsumi Kudo.
Yoko Ono, John Cage and Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu Foundation