How do you photograph history that people would rather forget, or grief that has no shape? Two Japanese photographers give very different answers

Kinsley

May 17, 2026
4 min read

There’s a detail worth noting in the press materials for Japan House London’s debut photography exhibition. The show, which opens on June 03, was originally titled Invisible [インヴィジブル].

It was later renamed Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai, presumably for clarity. But something was lost in the retitling: the original gets closer to what both photographers are actually doing. Neither is really interested in what’s in front of the lens; both are focused on what isn’t.

While both Japanese, Kawada Kikuji (born 1933) and Iwane Ai (1975) are separated by 42 years and work in almost entirely different registers. They’ve never exhibited together before, but put them together and a single question runs through everything on the walls:

What does a camera reveal that the naked eye (or collective memory or grief) refuses to see?

If you’ve ever made a picture that surprised you with what it contained, that question will feel familiar. And both of these artists have spent careers trying to answer it.

The two artists

Kawada came to prominence in the 1960s when he co-founded the Vivo collective, a group that collectively rewired what Japanese photography could do. His series Chizu (The Map, 1965), shown here alongside later work including Los Caprichos (1968–1981) and the Last Cosmology, is widely considered Japan’s most significant photobook.

Look at The Map and you’ll see what looks like abstract art: stained, scarred, almost painterly surfaces. In fact, you’re looking at the residue of postwar Hiroshima, made physical through wild darkroom experimentation.

An abstract, high-contrast composition of bright red paint dripping down a dark, textured wall, creating a stark and gritty vertical pattern.

From the series The Map (Image credit: © Kikuji Kawada (courtesy PGI))

A high-contrast black and white photograph looking directly up at a bright sun through the dark, skeletal ribs of a circular architectural dome. — From the series *The Map* (Image credit: © Kikuji Kawada (courtesy PGI))

A stark, vertical black and white photograph of a total solar eclipse, showing a perfectly dark lunar disk centered within a glowing, radiant white solar corona against an absolute black sky. — *The Last Total Eclipse of Sun in the 20th Century*, 1999, from the *The Last Cosmology* series (Image credit: © Kikuji Kawada (courtesy PGI))

Kawada worked partly from contact sheets, found paper and detritus. The resulting images don’t document history so much as make it tactile. This isn’t photography as record-keeping; it’s closer to something like archaeology.

Iwane is just as technically ambitious, but at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. Her photographic series A New River (2020), shot at night in the Tōhoku region during COVID, is the kind of work that makes you want to know exactly how it was made.

Working in complete darkness among cherry blossom trees, she shoots figures dressed as supernatural folkloric characters: shamanic priests, white-shrouded forms, creatures from Japanese folk tradition.

The exposures are long enough that the figures blur into the landscape, half-present and half-absorbed by the dark. The resulting images fuse together grief, hope and the consolation of ritual inside a single frame.

A dynamic shot of a person in a white and red costume emerging from behind a large tree trunk at night, illuminated by dramatic blue and green lighting with streaks of white light. — From the series *A New River*, 2020 (Image credit: © Iwane Ai)

A lone, white-shredded ceremonial costume stands upright in a dark field at night next to a small flowering tree, lit by a sharp spotlight against a black background. — From the series *A New River*, 2020 (Image credit: © Iwane Ai)

A close-up, red-filtered photograph capturing a woman's intense gaze between several pairs of hands raised in a rhythmic clapping motion. — *Paia Mantokuji Soto Mission, Paia, Hawaii*, 2015 (Image credit: © Iwane Ai)

Her earlier series, Kipuka (2018), seems different at first: panoramic, communal, warmly documentary in its depiction of Japanese immigrant communities in Hawaii.

But showing it alongside A New River enables us to see the similarities between the two. Both series explore transience, identity carried across generations and a sense of belonging maintained by ceremony.

A UK debut

The show is directed by the folks behind Kyotographie International Photography Festival, one of Asia’s biggest photography events. Founded in 2013 by Lucille Reyboz and Nakanishi Yūsuke, this Kyoto festival drew nearly 300,000 visitors last year. This is their first UK project.

It’s also a first for Japan House London, on Kensington High Street, which has never staged a photography show before. The run extends to October 18 and, if you’re able to get to London, it’s well worth a visit.