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There’s a element price noting within the press supplies for Japan House London’s debut images exhibition. The present, which opens on June 03, was initially titled Invisible [インヴィジブル].
It was later renamed Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai, presumably for readability. But one thing was misplaced within the retitling: the unique will get nearer to what each photographers are literally doing. Neither is admittedly curious about what’s in entrance of the lens; each are centered on what is not.
While each Japanese, Kawada Kikuji (born 1933) and Iwane Ai (1975) are separated by 42 years and work in virtually fully totally different registers. They’ve by no means exhibited collectively earlier than, however put them collectively and a single query runs by means of every thing on the partitions:
What does a digital camera reveal that the bare eye (or collective reminiscence or grief) refuses to see?
If you’ve got ever made an image that stunned you with what it contained, that query will really feel acquainted. And each of those artists have spent careers making an attempt to reply it.
The two artists
Kawada got here to prominence within the Sixties when he co-founded the Vivo collective, a group that collectively rewired what Japanese photography could do. His series Chizu (The Map, 1965), shown here alongside later work including Los Caprichos (1968–1981) and the Last Cosmology, is widely considered Japan’s most significant photobook.
Look at The Map and you’ll see what looks like abstract art: stained, scarred, almost painterly surfaces. In fact, you’re looking at the residue of postwar Hiroshima, made physical through wild darkroom experimentation.
Kawada worked partly from contact sheets, found paper and detritus. The resulting images don’t document history so much as make it tactile. This isn’t photography as record-keeping; it’s closer to something like archaeology.
Iwane is just as technically ambitious, but at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. Her photographic series A New River (2020), shot at night in the Tōhoku region during COVID, is the kind of work that makes you want to know exactly how it was made.
Working in complete darkness among cherry blossom trees, she shoots figures dressed as supernatural folkloric characters: shamanic priests, white-shrouded forms, creatures from Japanese folk tradition.
The exposures are long enough that the figures blur into the landscape, half-present and half-absorbed by the dark. The resulting images fuse together grief, hope and the consolation of ritual inside a single frame.
Her earlier series, Kipuka (2018), seems different at first: panoramic, communal, warmly documentary in its depiction of Japanese immigrant communities in Hawaii.
But showing it alongside A New River enables us to see the similarities between the two. Both series explore transience, identity carried across generations and a sense of belonging maintained by ceremony.
A UK debut
The show is directed by the folks behind Kyotographie International Photography Festival, one of Asia’s biggest photography events. Founded in 2013 by Lucille Reyboz and Nakanishi Yūsuke, this Kyoto festival drew nearly 300,000 visitors last year. This is their first UK project.
It’s also a first for Japan House London, on Kensington High Street, which has never staged a photography show before. The run extends to October 18 and, if you’re able to get to London, it’s well worth a visit.
Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai is at Japan House London, 101–111 Kensington High Street, London W8 5SA, from June 03 to October 18 2026.
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