The Map (Reprint Edition) Kikuji Kawada

*Available only in Europe

*This book is secondhand.

The first reprint, issued in 2005 by Getsuyosha and Nazraeli Press, of The Map, a legendary photobook first published in 1965 and, today, hard even to see in the original. Kikuji Kawada photographed in obsessive close-up the 'stains' covering the walls and ceiling of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, folding into them the portraits and last letters of kamikaze pilots, ruins and fragments of postwar Japan to draw a layered map of images concerning memory and forgetting. The original is famous for its avant-garde bookmaking by Kohei Sugiura, with its many fold-out pages, and care has been taken in this reprint to reproduce that intricate structure. Inscribing the subjects of defeat and the atomic bomb not through direct reportage but through a chain of symbols and black, near-abstract images, the work is a monumental achievement in the history of Japanese photography. In place of the barely obtainable original, it is a precious volume through which one can approach that experience.