Kikuji Kawada Los Caprichos
[1978]
“My Caprichos series has been drifting through synchronicities and coincidences in search of new meanings. Forever unfinished, its chaos continues, chained to the demon of tomorrow. The clouds, the moon, the city are my inescapable companions. When Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope at the night sky over Florence he was driven by a curiosity for new science and undiscovered memories. What emerges now, with the moon too close and the clouds in flux, is the occasional shadow of the demon. One afternoon, the golden moon covered the circle of the sun. The clouds raged, and unseen memories emerged from the city veiled in blue and black.”
- Kikuji Kawada
Kikuji Kawada (born 1933 in Ibaraki, Japan) is a major figure and our favourite photographer from the iconoclastic era of postwar Japanese expression. After graduating Kawada joined the publishing company Shinchosha as a photographer. Belonging to a generation that renewed the Japanese photographic language, he co-founded the pivotal VIVO collective in 1959 with Akira Satō, Akira Tanno, Shōmei Tōmatsu, Ikko Narahara, and Eikoh Hosoe. The photographer describes his work as capturing “the demons lurking in the era, fixed as shadows of astonishment,” adding that “memory itself could then become the mirror of the artist’s style.”
Kawada devoted seven years to Los Caprichos, documenting daily life in Tokyo from a surrealist view. The series was first shared in 1972 in Camera Manichi and other Japanese photography magazines. The title mimics Francisco de Goya’s 18th-century etchings series of the same name which are appreciated for their societal critique.
The series received its first solo exhibition in 1968 at Photo Gallery International [now PGI] in Tokyo, and was later grouped alongside The Last Cosmology and Car Maniac in his photobook The Globe Theater (1998).