Chizu / The Map (Signed)

Kikuji Kawada
Chizu / The Map (Signed)

Photographs: Kikuji Kawada

Publisher: Nazraeli Press & Getsuyosha Ltd

49 pages

Year: 2005

Comments: Hardcover, cloth bound in illustrated slipcase, with a text booklet, edition of 500 numbered copies from Nazraeli.(500 copies in Japan). Signed in kanji (Chinese characters) .As new condition

First published on August 6, 1965, the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima - The Map ("Chizu") is one of the most important photobooks ever. It has appeared in Roth's Book of 101 Books, Parr & Badger The Photobook: A History, Vol I and the Photobokks of the 1960s and 1970s by Ivan Vartanian and Ryuichi Kaneko as well.

"No photobook has been more successful in combining graphic design with complex photographic narrative. [as its] various layers inside [are] peeled away like archeological strata, the whole process of viewing the book becomes one of uncovering and contemplating the ramifications of recent Japanese history -- especially the country's tangled relationship with the United States. Kawada's photographs are a masterly amalgam of abstraction and realism, of the specific and the ineffable, woven into a tapestry that makes the act of reading them a process of re-creation in itself. In the central metaphor of the map, in the idea of the map as a series of interlocking trace marks, Kawada has conjured a brilliant simile for the photograph itself: scientific record, memory trace, cultural repository, puzzle and guide."--Parr & Badger