Kyotographie's Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai closes at Japan House on 18 October

Japan House London gives visitors until 18 October to see Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai, an exhibition organised by the Japanese photography festival that pairs two image-makers born 48 years apart. Kawada, now nearing 100, shows work from the 1950s to the present. Iwane, born in 1975, presents two series rooted in grief, migration and memory.

What does Kawada's half-century of work show?

The centrepiece is Kawada's series Chizu (The Map), published as a book in 1965 — exactly 20 years after the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The series records munitions bunkers, Special Forces soldiers, survivors with facial scars, and American consumer goods Kawada found in the wrecked city, including Lucky Strike cigarettes and Coca Cola bottles.

Kawada came to prominence in the 1960s after founding the VIVO collective with photographers including Eikoh Hosoe and Shōmei Tōmatsu. The group rejected quasi-objective documentary photography in favour of an "are-bure-boke" — "blurry and out-of-focus" — approach meant to evoke a deeper reality.

"I don't start out with a title or theme in mind," Kawada says in a video made with Kyotographie. "But then suddenly, unexpectedly, something really not logically, but intuitively, appears out of nowhere. That's how it works."

His installation includes a projection room flicking through photographs he recently posted on Instagram. Kawada remains restlessly experimental as he approaches 100. "Since photography inevitably cuts out a single moment, that also means you can reconstruct time in any way you like," he says. "When various layers of time overlap, then human psychology, the atmosphere of an era, the state of society, even my own mental state – all these emerge."

What does Iwane Ai bring?

Iwane shows Kipuka, shot in 2018, which focuses on Japanese immigrant communities in Hawaii and centres on the o-bon, a festival honouring ancestors and the dead. The festival includes a circular dance and a song, the "Fukushima Ondo", originally from the region devastated by the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident.

Using a rotating panoramic camera — a format these communities traditionally used to photograph funerals — Iwane gathers festival crowds and displays the long prints as curling walkways. Visitors walk between them, immersed in the crowd. Her images also include panoramic shots of cemeteries and of streets wrecked by a nature beyond human control.

Her second series, A New River, was shot during the Covid pandemic in 2020. It shows cherry trees in bloom — in Japan, a symbol of transience as much as celebration — alongside figures from Japanese folklore. The work is underpinned by personal grief: Iwane was under a blossoming cherry tree when she learned her sister had died.

"It was a very hard time for me for a long time, and I kept thinking about her every day," Iwane says in a Kyotographie video. "Maybe after one or a couple of years, there was the day that I realised 'Oh today I never thought about her'." She then searched her own photographs of her sister: "I won't be able to photograph my sister or anyone who has passed but the picture and the memory stay."

How is the exhibition installed?

Spatial designer Hiromitsu Konishi helped build the show around the circle as a motif. A round table gathers Kawada's publications in a room devoted to The Last Cosmology, his series of celestial phenomena such as eclipses. Iwane's panoramas snake through the gallery, while A New River images hang in concentric waves around the visitor.

The exhibition stays darkly lit throughout, with spotlights picking out the photographs. The viewer's first-hand reality recedes into shadow, and the world of the images surfaces — less photography as observation than evocation of emotion. For Frieze-week visitors in London, the pairing of a photographer nearing 100 and one born in 1975 offers a rare study in how two generations test the same medium's limits.