Eric Chaim Kline, Bookseller - Old and Rare Books

Chizu / The Map [THE ULTIMATE PHOTOBOOK-AS-OBJECT... A MASTERFUL AMALGAM OF ABSTRACTION AND REALISM]

Kawada, Kikuji (川田喜久治). Kenzaburo Oe; Kohei Sugiura

Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1965. First edition. Hardcover. Octavo (235 by 155 mm). Sumptuously illustrated with 49 double-page and 23 quadruple-page black and white photogravure images on 190 pages; each quadruple-page image presented as gatefold on 2 folded leaves. Black paper boards (with barest rubbing), lettered in white at spine; photo-illustrated dust jacket, with map legend printed in white on versos; inside the original graphic die-cut black paper chemise lettered in white and stenciled in blue, as issued; folded broadside text leaf (223 by 565 mm) with poem in Japanese (recto) and English (verso), loosely inserted as issued. Occasional mild rubbing to leaf edges; several with a slight fold or rumple around the gatefolds. Dustjacket with mild rubbing, and some light wear at caps and top edge. Chemise with just a touch of rubbing. Lacks original printed cardboard slipcase, but now housed in a custom red cloth clamshell box for protection.

First edition (one of 700 copies), published on the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. This extraordinary publication, one of the true icons in the history of photography, was designed by Kohei Sugiura and features Kikuji Kawada's masterful photography. "The most brilliantly designed Japanese book of its century" (Keyes), it is "an extraordinarily refined, avant-garde book object (Roth). In this "defining photobook of post-war Japan... [Kawada] has conjured up a brilliant simile for the photograph itself -- scientific record, memory trace, cultural repository, puzzle and guide" (Parr and Badger).

The genesis of this work was related by Kawada to Kenzaburo Oe, who transformed the tale into poetry which can be found on the inserted broadside. After being struck by an assailant and falling to the ground "I saw a map close to my wounded eyes. While it was nothing but a little piece of ground stained with heavy oil, it really appeared to me like a map of the world full of violence, in which I was to live henceforth" (Roth). Kawada "juxtapos[es] images of military memorabIlia of the Special Attack Corps (Kamikaze) from the Museum at Etajima with abstract close-ups of blistered and radiated wall surfaces from Hiroshima... The Abstract images are presented as the outer pages of gatefolds that open to reveal pictures of tattered uniforms, farewell letters, a crumpled rising sun flag, contrasted with symbols of the culture that displaced Japan's imperial history -- billboards, television sets, Coca-Cola bottles (Parr and Badger). "Kawada photographs the darkness of cramped urban spaces, half-glimpsed signs, crumbling buildings, and peeling paint looking for guideposts to a shadowy underworld of the mind. But this artist's mindscape has a specific and highly charged reference. Published on the twenty-year anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima, the book documents the environs of the Municipal Building, a blast survivor, and now a monument to the dead. Simultaneous records of the physical world and maps of a purely psychic reality, Kawada's fluid, blurred, grainy photographs (and the map on the cover, which charts the islands around Hiroshima) are like memento mori, reminders that the landscape we accept as real and expect to be filled with sunlight can dissolve in an instant with one blow to the head" (Roth).

Text in Japanese and English. Very good-. Item #54564

Heiting and Kaneko, Japanese Photobook, 282: noting print run 800; Keyes, Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan 66; Parr and Badger, The Photobook, vol. 1, pp. 286-7; A. Roth, The Book of 101 Books, pp. 26-7; 174-5: noting print run 700.

Price: $25,000.00