Chizu (Maquette Edition) - Kikuji Kawada

Kikuji Kawada’s photobook “Chizu / The Map” is one of the most legendary photobooks in Japanese photography. Originally published in 1965, Kawada’s photographs follow the blemishes on the walls and ceiling of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial to form a metaphorical tapestry that allows the reader to uncover the aftermath of Japan’s recent history.

“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.” ― Martin Parr and Gerry Badger (in “The Photobook: A History, Volume 1”)

This edition by Mack is a facsimile of Kikuji Kawada’s handmade, one-of-a-kind maquette edition, currently in the possession of the New York Public Library:
“The maquette presents a notably different physicality than that of the published edition—many of the pictures are the same but with variant croppings, tonalities, orientations, and a markedly dissimilar configuration with a pair of jacketed volumes—each nearly twice as large in format as the published version—separated by a black-and-white divider. With its pages made of thin, silvery darkroom prints, folded in half and pasted back-to-back, there are no folios to unfurl, only a progression of intense, full-bleed images.” (from Mack’s description)

Additionally, this publication includes a booklet with commentary by Joshua Chuang and Miyuki Hinton as well as an interview with Kikuji Kawada.

first edition

stock number: NB487