As one of the most celebrated and innovative Japanese photographers working today, Kawada Kikuji is one of the two photographers whose works are the subject of the Japan House London exhibition Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai (3 June – 18 October 2026). Curator Lucy Fleming-Brown examines how Kawada broke away from photographic norms to establish a new way of expressing reality in post-war Japan.
Kawada Kikuji’s approach to photography has often been described as archaeological in its use of the camera to collect, document and reflect on fragments of our past. His most famous work The Map (Chizu) developed over seven years, beginning with his first visit to Hiroshima in 1958. It would continue to take shape until Kawada alighted on a book design capable of structuring the project’s diverse contents, which was eventually published in 1965. The incremental process of research and recovery, gathering materials and analyzing them before representing them in different formats, might sound more like social science than art practice. However, Kawada’s creative negotiation of photography’s relationship with reality exemplifies a preoccupation he shared with other members of the ‘image generation,’ a cohort of Japanese photographers who rose to prominence towards the end of the 1950s.
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The Map’s progress coincided with the rise and fall of this tendency, prompted by a critical reckoning with the approaches popularized by photojournalists in the years following the Occupation, and culminating in the formation of the Vivo cooperative. Changing ideas about photographic responsibility and the true nature of documentary shaped Kawada’s perspective as a young photographer, and the story of The Map’s genesis reflects the influence of individuals and social structures that contributed to the wider evolution of Japan’s distinctive photographic culture during the postwar period.
Before The Map: Kawada and Japan’s photographic landscape after the Occupation
Kawada was born in 1933 in Ibaraki Prefecture, where he first embraced photography as a high school student in the years following World War II. He moved to Tokyo to study economics, while continuing to enter his pictures in monthly competitions run by amateur photo magazines and participating in his university’s camera club. Upon graduation he joined the publishing house Shinchōsha as a staff photographer, and it was through this job that Kawada came face to face with some of the most famous photographers of the 1950s including Domon Ken and Kimura Ihei. They recognized Kawada from his work submitted to public photography contests, and Kawada has cited Domon and Kimura as important influences on the development of his early interest in photography.
These photographers were known throughout Japan for photojournalism, and their style of reportage was associated with Realism, a movement that became dominant at the end of the Occupation. As Domon described it in 1952, ‘Realism in photography is a basic method of snapshot photography, the primary requisite of which is that it be “absolutely unstaged.” […] If there is even the slightest hint of pose, artificiality, or performance in the photograph – no matter how well it is composed, or how demonstrative it may be – with time and with repeated viewing, it will not hold up.’
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During this period Realist photographers were accustomed to receiving the most high-profile commissions from publishers, and in 1958 Domon was invited by Shinchōsha to shoot a new series in Hiroshima under the auspices of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. Kawada was sent to assist Domon, and it was on this first visit to the city that he slipped away from shooting and discovered the ruined building known today as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.
It was damp, dark, there was a strange smell […] My eyes took a moment to adjust before I noticed the stains. It was an unspeakably powerful moment. I felt like I had encountered this terrifying, unknown place. I had the illusion that I could almost hear faint voices merged with the wind and crackling sounds coming out of the walls.
Domon Ken’s photobook Hiroshima (1958) recorded the effects of radiation on a civilian population more than a decade after the nuclear explosion. It presents social documentary pictures shot in local hospitals, orphanages and homes from a frank, broadly humanistic perspective. However, Kawada’s uncanny encounter with the Dome’s weathering and shadows inspired him to explore a more abstract and textural approach. The pictures he took there (the earliest to feature in The Map) give no hint of scale or depth, instead presenting constellations of decay that appear like smoke or geological formations. Using tonal contrast to create a sense of distance within the concrete walls, the experience of surveying these surfaces feels closer to travelling through them, reinforcing Kawada’s impression of visceral immersion and the book’s association with physical excavation.
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The ANPO struggle and challenges to photojournalism
The difference between Domon and Kawada’s engagement with Hiroshima is indicative of a wider division between the generation of photographers who began their careers after the war, and the earlier generation of photojournalists. In 1960, cities across Japan convulsed with massive protests opposing the renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty (popularly referred to as ‘ANPO’), which indefinitely permitted the presence of American military bases on Japanese soil. The climate of heightened political consciousness that accompanied this decade-long struggle led photographers to consider the role of their profession in Japan’s recent history, and prompted circumspection regarding their own responsibilities going forward. They became critical of older photographers like Domon, whose creative talents had been harnessed by the imperial administration to create propaganda and whose careers were founded on the privilege of having received tightly controlled photographic materials. Through this support, they had continued to publish throughout the wartime era of widespread censorship, before adopting photojournalism in the aftermath of defeat.
The curator Fukushima Tatsuo recognized this shift as early as 1957 and called for the upcoming generation of photographers to embrace new attitudes: “The world of photography is changing in a major way. It is a time when everyone must think about the future of photography […] severing ties with established photography and establishing a new photography.” Fukushima invited a group of young photographers including Kawada to share work that he believed constituted a new kind of documentary, organizing a series of exhibitions titled The Eyes of Ten. Other members who presented their photography at these early shows went on to attain acclaim in their subsequent careers, including Tōmatsu Shōmei, Hosoe Eikoh, Narahara Ikkō and Tokiwa Toyoko (whose work features in the exhibition Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now, on display at The Photographer’s Gallery from 24 June – 27 September 2026.)
Whilst their themes and approaches varied significantly, Eyes of Ten participants shared a common interest in understanding photographs as documents. Unlike the photojournalists, they did not believe that this characteristic lay in capturing ‘absolutely unstaged’ scenes. Instead they experimented with more subjective visions (or ‘personal documentary’ as Narahara Ikkō described his own practice.) Their projects often derived meaning from symbols, and emphasized the role played by photographers’ individual perception and interpretation. They embraced the expressive potential of techniques including montage, contrast, double exposure and staging – exactly the kinds of processes that Domon had decried as cutting photographs off from reality.
From the ‘Image Generation’ to Vivo
The emergence of this new mode of photographic engagement attracted attention in both intellectual circles and public discourse. Critics like Shigemori Kōen drew parallels with the rise of New Wave cinema abroad and speculated that growing cynicism about the objectivity of mass media had encouraged photographers to seek methods by which stories could be told exclusively through “the language of images.” Instead of taking pictures in accordance with an ideology or an attitude like Realism, these photographers prioritized the independent logic of images themselves. It was this emphasis that earned them the label the ‘image generation’ (eizo-ha). This description was commonly referenced in discussions about photography, film and media, but the practitioners whose work inspired the term did not seek to define their collective identity more strictly.
Following the final Eyes of Ten show in 1959, six of the exhibitors (Kawada, Tōmatsu, Narahara and Hosoe, along with Tanno Akira and Satō Akira) established an office called Vivo in East Ginza, Tokyo. Vivo’s short-lived period of activity was remembered by Kawada for its ‘collaborative atmosphere,’ however members continued to pursue their independent visions and projects throughout and the cooperative disbanded after only two years. However, stories of American photographer William Klein visiting their offices while shooting in Tokyo and a young Moriyama Daidō coming to make prints have ensured Vivo’s position in photo legend, and the cooperative is often treated as the epicentre of the ‘image generation’s’ activities.
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Vivo came to an end several years before The Map’s release in 1965, when a new generation of photographers were already formulating their own responses to the questions raised by members of Kawada’s cohort. In spite of the era’s turbulent image politics, since his first visit to Hiroshima in 1958 Kawada remained committed to exploring different subjects that reflected his interest in representing Japan’s complex postwar history. He presented different groups of these pictures at small-scale independent exhibitions and in photo magazines, carefully reconsidering the book’s sophisticated structure several times before its eventual publication. In whatever form we encounter his work today, Kawada’s perspective is charged with a critical, experimental sensitivity that speaks to the conflicted social and artistic context in which he came of age.