Kikuji Kawada’s images is very symbolic. He has captured harrowing moments all through his profession: despatched on a journalistic task to Hiroshima, he recorded the scars of the explosion, with pictures of flags and Coca Cola bottles and packets of Lucky Strike potent symbols to intuit bigger resonances of what he skilled there.
It was on that day that Kawada found his aesthetic, and his path ahead in images. Part of the massively influential VIVO Group (1957-61) Kawada was one in every of an era-defining, boundary-pushing group in Japanese images whose legacy might be felt to today. Each of them captured the nation altering after the Second World War in a unique wa,y with a majority deal with black and white images, wealthy in symbolism.
In 1965 he would make a guide of his collection, Chizu, or The Map, now thought-about one of the vital essential photobooks of all time. In combining textual content and different references alongside his expressive images, he made one thing each new and enduring. It was in the course of the pandemic that Kawada returned to The Map, rethinking this seminal venture and creating an Endless Map, proven right here on the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima at Recontres d’Arles.
(Image credit score: © Kikuji Kawada, Courtesy PGI)
Endless Map–Invisible, is an outline of Kawada’s work curated by his gallerist Sayaka Takahashi and offered by Kyotograpie and SIGMA. It was successful on the opening week of Rencontres d’Arles the place it was a part of the affiliate programme.
The exhibition options work from a choice of collection from Kawada’s physique of labor, alongside The Map (1959-1965) and Endless Map (2021) are The Last Cosmology (1995), Los Caprichos (1972-present) and Vortex (2022). Both Endless Map and Los Caprichos have been revisited and up to date by the artist throughout Covid giving a singular overview of his follow – however does what impressed him early in his profession encourage him at the moment?
‘It could or could not have carried over someplace, photojournalistic alternatives can come out of nowhere,’ Kawada mentioned. ‘It could seem in a piece that was performed a few years in the past, and you’ll’t say that it’s utterly unrelated. The gaze step by step adjustments from inside and with out. The gaze is sort of a private worldview that’s created with out realizing it. Sometimes it adjustments, and typically we really feel it’s progressing with out a lot change.’
Los Caprichos, taking its title from the collection of etchings by the eighteenth-century Spanish grasp Francisco Goya, which means ‘The Caprices’ is an epic collection of pictures exploring confinement and ‘mental architecture’. Captured throughout a interval of speedy change and financial progress in Japan, the collection seems on the affect of those adjustments on the psyche. The choice chosen by Takahashi consists of pictures from the Seventies as much as later pictures posted by Kawada to Instagram.
From the collection The Last Cosmology
(Image credit score: © Kikuji Kawada, Courtesy PGI)
These pictures, all printed on Awagami washi paper, differ from a swimmer shot from underwater bathed in dappled gentle, to layered and edited pictures altered utilizing expertise or processing strategies leaning into abstraction. Layering and altering pictures has all the time been part of Kawada’s follow, and on the age of 93 – and as an early adopter of digital within the late Nineteen Nineties – he’s nonetheless drawn to the latest technological improvements.
‘Photography has additionally been vastly influenced by new applied sciences,’ he says. “I am not sure that the old technology is really going to be lost in the wave of new science, but I continue to be attracted.’ Kawada has long experimented with technological intervention, from leaving the timestamps on images, to using darkroom techniques which alter the mood. As innovations progressed, he used these to create evocative atmospheres. While a technically great photographer, his photography is never about simply capturing an image, but exploring what that image says.
The Last Cosmology started when he took photographs of the sky on 11th September 2001, and the sky was an unusual red colour. Seeing this as significant, he took a photo on that day every year, that same red sky never appearing again. The series covers the last decade of the Japanese Shōwa era (1926-1989), the reign of Emperor Shōwa which encompassed many tragic events including nuclear disaster, natural disaster and war. These photographs look at the sky, the moon, the sun and astronomical phenomena including an eclipse. Takahashi speaks of the lure of the sky as a symbol for different mental states. Kawada says he is drawn to the moon: “For all its changes. Also, the sun. From the wonder of the ancients to the present of this violent world.”
From the series Los Caprichos, Invisible
(Image credit: © Kikuji Kawada, Courtesy PGI)
The most recent work on view is Vortex (2022), a dual slideshow projection of the same images shown out of time and order at 45-degree angles to one another. The installation shows only images from Kawada’s Instagram account, a random but coherent series of shots in black and white that encompasses the Covid era and explore patterns and symbolism, many of the motifs found across Kawada’s body of work.
Hung on handmade washi paper made in Arles by Wataru Hatano and team staged at the concept store Vague by Hiromitsu Konishi, this is a special exhibition exploring over six decades of work by a living artist. Contextualised by the central gathering of the photography industry at Rencontres d’Arles, it is a window into a renowned but under exhibited region. Despite his impact on photography this is Kawada’s first solo presentation in Europe, we hope the first of many.
Kikuji Kawada at Arles till 5 October