Kawada Kikuji's Chizu: A Black-and-White Photography Monument

The Boston Globe · Mark Feeney · 2026-11-04 20:00 UTC

The rich black-and-white photographs in "Kawada Kikuji (The Map)" are stark portrayals of Western culture's impact on Japan after World War II.

For decades, we’ve lived in a photographic world where color is the norm. That wasn’t always the case. For various reasons — technical, financial, artistic, associative (color was seen as unserious) — black-and-white dominated art photography.

When he assembled his 1965 photobook, “Chizu (The Map),” Kawada Kikuji surely didn’t intend it as a kind of quintessence of black-and-white photography. But such is the blackness of its blacks and whiteness of its whites, and the colliding force of the contrast between them, that that’s what he effectively did. The book is, in that sense, a monument to black-and-white photography, being black-and-white at its most assertive. It’s also a monument to both a key moment in Japanese culture and to timeless issues that transcend any one culture.

In 2022, the Museum of Fine Arts bought an original copy of the book from the photographer, who’s now 93. It also acquired from him photographs, negatives, notes, and contact sheets. From that substantial archive comes “Kawada Kikuji: Chizu (The Map).” It runs at the MFA through July 18.

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