Visions of obliteration: an image by Kawada Kikuji from the series The Map. Photograph: Kikuji Kawada/© Kikuji Kawada, Courtesy PGI View image in fullscreen Visions of obliteration: an image by Kawada Kikuji from the series The Map. Photograph: Kikuji Kawada/© Kikuji Kawada, Courtesy PGI Photography Review Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai review – staggering images of the aftermath of shattering violence Japan House, London This darkly atmospheric exhibition pairs the revolutionary Hiroshima images of revered photographer Kikuji with Ai’s glittering but deeply melancholy visions of cherry blossom
Prefer the Guardian on Google J apan House’s first, free photography exhibition, Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai begins with slow-burning suggestions of fire: a box of Lucky Strike cigarettes, its surface crackling and curled; Coca-Cola bottles sinking into a dark bed of crushed ashes. Kikuji took the photographs with a 4x5 plate camera; here they’re reprinted on washi paper, the textures and density of the blackness making them even more evocative of obliteration. They are vestiges of American culture in the wake of American violence – images found in the wreckage of Hiroshima in the aftermath of atomic destruction.
Kikuji, now 93, is a photo geek’s photographer; people have paid up to £25,000 for a copy of Chizu (The Map), the photobook that collects together his tense, ruminative Hiroshima impressions , made when he was in his 20s. A series of seemingly abstract images depicts the stains on the wall – all that remained of bodies in the Genbaku (A-Bomb) Dome. Kikuji was 12 when the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima. His approach to capturing one of the worst scenes of mass destruction in human history was to tell it with a kind of detachment, indirect and impressionistic, fragmented. It’s a story about proximity to trauma and surviving it. His photographs veer away from truth. The reality is impossible to comprehend – for both Kikuji standing there, and us viewing the images. These were revolutionary photographs at the time – and they still feel new in their search to express the inexpressible.
View image in fullscreen Kawada Kikuji’s Invisible, from the series Los Caprichos. Photograph: © Kikuji Kawada, Courtesy PGI The dimly lit, subterranean gallery keeps you cocooned in this elegiac, brooding atmosphere. Kikuji is drawn to images that trace the extremities of the Earth, the visible outer edges of our existence – the sky, the horizon, water, burning suns and scorching fires. In the best part of these show, all these parameters collide. Vortex is a three-channel projection of digital images cribbed from Kikuji’s recent Instagram posts . The ambient images jump between projections, reappearing in new orders, creating new affinities and dissonances between them as they do – but just like in life, they’re too fleeting to catch on to and hold for long. You try to keep up, piecing together silhouettes, shadows, smoke, clouds, reflections and blurs of vaporous, vibrant colour as they appear like a mirage in a flickering sequence. It feels like swimming against the current. I give up trying to find the seam, and just let the atmosphere flow into me. Perhaps this is all we can do – let go.
This message primes you for the emotional climax of this exhibition, a series of works by Iwane Ai , a younger, female photographer from Japan. The two are connected loosely by themes of environment, loss and belonging, but more by the spectral, poetic a…