Kikuji Kawada

Kikuji Kawada (川田 喜久治, Kawada Kikuji; born 1933) is a Japanese photographer. He co-founded the Vivo photographic collective in 1959. Kawada's books include Chizu (The Map; 1965) and The Last Cosmology (1995). He was included in the New Japanese Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1974 and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Photographic Society of Japan in 2011.

Life and work

Kawada co-founded the Vivo photographic collective in 1959 with Akira Sato, Eikoh Hosoe, Ikko Narahara, Akira Tanno and Shomei Tomatsu. Sean O'Hagan wrote that "broke the traditions of photojournalism and landscape photography, leading it towards a more experimental, often polemical form."

Kawada's book Chizu (The Map) has been praised by critics. Brett Rogers, director of The Photographers' Gallery, London, has said it is a "deeply moving and highly original investigation into a seminal moment in Japanese history." In The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger describe Chizu as being amongst four books that "constitute photography's most significant memorials to the defining event in twentieth-century Japanese history" and that it is "the ultimate photobook-as-object, combining a typical Japanese attention to the art of refined packaging with hard-hitting photography, text and typography – a true photo-text piece. No photobook has been more successful in combining graphic design with complex photographic narrative." O'Hagan wrote in The Guardian that it is "perhaps the most intricately designed and powerfully evocative Japanese photobook ever [ . . . ] By turns impressionistic and surreal, the book demands a degree of patient, silent contemplation that echoes the act of remembering."

O'Hagan wrote of The Last Cosmology (1995) that "the strange skies full of lunar portents, forks of lightning, fleeting meteorites and blocked out suns are a kind of mirror of Kawada's brooding, troubled soul.