Kawada Kikuji

Kikuji Kawada (b. 1933) was a major influence on the development of Japanese photography after the era of realism. He co-founded the photographer-run agency VIVO in 1959. His photo book Chizu (The Map), published in 1965, is a widely acclaimed masterpiece that symbolically captures Japan's memories and influences of World War II twenty years after the war's end. Since the 1960s, Kawada has repeatedly examined, restructured, and reimagined his photographic work. Among his best-known masterpieces are the series Los Caprichos, inspired by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya and rhapsodically exploring the ghostly effects of his images, and Last Cosmology, in which he allegorically expresses themes and feelings of finality and the end of an era in natural and cosmic images.

*This text was contributed by Mitsuhiro Wakayama.
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