One of the most important photobooks ever made is getting a full museum treatment. Kawada Kikuji: Chizu (The Map) opens Saturday, October 24 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and runs through July 18, 2027 in the Herb Ritts Gallery (Gallery 169). It is built from the MFA's own archive of the project, acquired directly from the photographer in 2022, so this is not a handful of prints on a wall. It is the whole machine behind the book.
The book
Kawada published Chizu on August 6, 1965, exactly 20 years after the destruction of Hiroshima. He first visited the city in 1958 and kept going back over the next several years. In the MFA's description, Coca-Cola bottles litter the ground, the stained walls and ceilings of the Atomic Bomb Dome carry haunting traces of violence, ruined fortresses dot the landscape around Tokyo Bay, and relics from dead soldiers point to futures that never arrived. Elsewhere in the series: a crumpled, mud-stained Japanese flag and discarded Lucky Strike packs, like the one on this page.
The book itself was a three-way collaboration. Kawada shot the images, the pioneering graphic designer Sugiura Kohei built its layered sequencing, and the main text was written by the Nobel Prize-winning author Oe Kenzaburo. The MFA calls it one of the most important photobooks in the history of photography, and the museum's 2022 acquisition announcement notes that scholars have cited it as one of the most extraordinary and evocative of all time.
What is in the room
This is where the show gets special. The MFA holds the book's 87 photographic images, their negatives, Kawada's binders of contact sheets and personal notes, and a rare first edition of the photobook. The exhibition draws on all of it, which means you can see how a sequence like this gets built, from the contact sheet to the final spread. For anyone who loves photobooks, contact sheets are the closest thing to reading over the photographer's shoulder.
Kawada himself linked the archive to In the Wake, the MFA exhibition that followed the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. In the acquisition announcement he said that show steered Chizu in a new direction, and that he came to see the MFA as the place where its images and history "may be retained and regenerated today and in the future."
Why it lands now
The museum frames the show as a way to sit with ambiguity and to connect Kawada's work to today's image-saturated world. That is the right angle. Chizu was built from layered, juxtaposed black-and-white pictures that refuse a clear story, and a feed full of fragments is not so different. Kawada was also one of the founders of the VIVO photography collective, established in Tokyo in 1959, so the show doubles as a door into one of the great moments in Japanese photography.
Our call
This one is Surfacing. A legendary photobook shown with its negatives, notes and contact sheets, on view for nine months, is a rare chance to see how a masterpiece was made. Plan a trip through the MFA's visit page and book through tickets. The full lineup is on the MFA's advance exhibition schedule.
More photography and exhibitions on the site: our look at Tina Barney's Fashion book from Aperture, Es Devlin at the Design Museum and Charley Harper at the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Also on unknowndivide: Hirokazu Koreeda's Look Back Opens in Theaters December 30.
%20October%2024){kind=link}