Japan 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. Kawada 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 after atomic destruction.
Kawada, 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 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. Kawada 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 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 Kawada 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.
The dimly lit, subterranean gallery keeps you cocooned in this elegiac, brooding atmosphere. Kawada is drawn to images that trace the extremities of the Earth – the sky, the horizon, water, burning suns and scorching fires. In the best part of the show, all these parameters collide. Vortex is a three-channel projection of digital images cribbed from Kawada’s recent Instagram posts. The ambient images jump between projections, reappearing in new orders, creating new affinities and dissonances. 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.
This primes you for the emotional climax: 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 atmosphere of their works. Iwane’s section starts with a curving panoramic UV print, glowing red and blue, dozens of larger-than-life hands raised in the air. The 2015 work, Kīpuka: Paia Mantokuji Soto Mission, depicts members of the Japanese community in Hawaii performing traditional Bon dances, a Buddhist ritual to honour ancestors that originated in Fukushima. Kīpuka refers to the Hawaiian term for an oasis in a bed of new lava, an image folding destruction into renewal. Passing between these hands, you’re in the middle of a celebration and revolt, hands thrown up in protest and defeat.
Humanity feels small and blighted in the works of both artists, and phantoms are everywhere: Iwane creates spectral portraits by projecting old archival pictures on to sugarcane fields and photographing them. In another series, her glowing, glittering visions of cherry blossoms in Tohoku are among Japan’s most widely photographed subjects, but here they are deeply melancholy, evoking the impermanence of life. The exhibition is a powerful meditation on survival, memory, and the aftermath of violence.
